Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform that provides subscription-based services to its users. The list of services includes both infrastructure solutions (e.g., servers and storage) and ready-made platforms (databases, development environment, etc.).

AWS first appeared on the market in 2006 and today ranks second in terms of capacity.

List of services

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The service provides subscribers with virtual server platforms, data storage systems and a load balancer. Users are free to choose a pre-configured server with a pre-installed operating system, as well as set it up on their own. The service also allows users to create their own images or use their own OS. For security, subscribers can differentiate access to EC2 servers by IP-addresses.

The service is charged per hour and some options are charged on a monthly basis. If the client plans to use EC2, it is better to use the reservation function. A subscriber pays for 3 months at a time and the final cost goes down by 1.5 times.

• Simple Storage (S3) provides subscribers with distributed disk space with a maximum size of 5TB. S3 stores files in the so-called buckets, which are located at different Amazon platforms.

The service keeps a constant log of all transactions on the storage and saves the information in a special bucket. This allows clients to immediately get detailed information about the latest operations. A distinctive feature of the service is the replacement of http protocol with BitTorrent for downloading files.

Subscribers are free to choose their own security policies, which are applied to the buckets. This leads to differentiating access rights for users, making the cloud fully private, etc. The service is charged monthly. The cost depends on the amount of disk space, the number of requests and outgoing traffic.

• Relational Database Service provides users with a virtual database, which is located on an allocated server. In this case the platform is configured and optimized for the chosen database. The minimum size of the disk space for the database is 5TB.

Access is adjusted depending on user preferences and security policies. For example, customers can allow access only from certain IP addresses (subnets) or security groups listed in the EC2 service.

Subscribers have access to SnapShot, replication (asynchronous and synchronous), automatic data backup, and metric cluster.

Payment is similar to the EC2 service – by the hour. If you pay for three or more months in advance, the total cost is reduced by 1.5 times. The customer pays for additional features separately.

• Route 53 allows users to host a DNS server in the Amazon cloud. The service integrates easily with other AWS services.

Fees are charged for the number of requests to the server, but there is a free limit as well.

Amazon Web Services provides users with most cloud solutions at an affordable price. Reliability and fault tolerance are guaranteed at the “six nines” level (99.9999%). The customers are flexible while customizing the required list of available services by selecting only the necessary ones. Each service has its own personal limit (Free Tier), which significantly reduces the cost of the provided service.