When starting a new online service, companies can find many advantages in using some of Amazon’s AWS platforms. As an experienced developer, I have used several of these services and can recommend them to others who are starting online services or dynamic websites.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) began in 2002, leveraging infrastructure already in place by one of the Internet’s largest e-retailers. AWS provides a variety of web services that can form what is now popularly known as a “cloud.”
AWS currently offers approximately 20 web services for use in the cloud. The most popular to date are Elastic Cloud Compute and Simple Storage Service, known as EC2 and S3 respectively.
S3
Perhaps the fastest service existing website owners can take advantage of is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is an online file storage system with built-in high redundancy and infinite scalability. Amazon uses server clusters around the world to guarantee up to 99.999999999% retention and 99.99% uptime for any data you upload to S3.
Any existing file (up to 5 GB in size per file) from a website can be easily migrated to S3, allowing it to be used as a content delivery network (CDN). Amazon’s AWS infrastructure resides on super-fast internet backbones, meaning content will typically be delivered much faster than if it were delivered from cheap shared hosting accounts. For the relatively cheap price per GB of storage and data transfer, many website owners currently using web hosting with limited storage and bandwidth can see instant cost reductions by migrating to S3 for content delivery.
For large websites and online services serving massive amounts of data, the cost performance of Amazon S3 can be very high and in some cases a necessary tool when other services cannot store such large amounts of data.
For a business considering starting a content-rich or online file-sharing service, such as a photo or video sharing site, Amazon S3 offers many benefits and performance that would otherwise require a large upfront outlay.
EC2
Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is to server hosting what S3 is to file storage: infinitely scalable and cost-effective.
With EC2, you can set up your own pool of virtual servers running in the Amazon server cloud. You can choose to run a single low-power virtual server or a group of thousands of high-performance virtual servers, and everything in between. Each server you run is called an “instance” and you can choose to use an instance for as little as one billable hour.
Being able to choose how long you use an instance, along with how powerful it is, allows start-ups to try out a powerful new web application without the need to provision expensive hardware up front. This greatly alleviates the risk often encountered with web startups having to calculate how much capacity they will need once the site becomes popular. Underestimating capacity can mean a service interruption, overestimating will make the service less profitable.
The EC2 platform is also fully programmable, meaning companies can build intelligent systems that will scale as capacity limits per instance are encountered. When the server load is high, for example, more instances can be activated and share the system load. When the load decreases, unnecessary instances can be powered off, keeping cost and efficiency constant.
Currently, there are several Windows and Linux Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) available for users to use as a starting point when customizing their virtual servers. User-contributed AMIs are also available, with purpose-built server configurations available.
Pairing of EC2 and S3
For startups and existing web services looking to migrate, a combination of EC2 server hosting and S3 as a content delivery network may be an ideal solution. For those who can use both services, there is an additional benefit in that the internetwork traffic between your EC2 and S3 accounts will generally be free of any bandwidth costs.
For detailed information on EC2, S3, and a variety of other Amazon web services, visit:
Amazon Web Services