Finbarr McCarthy

When most people think Amazon they think “on-line book store”, however over the last couple of years Amazon has been silently positioning itself as one of the industry leaders in Cloud Computing.

Amazon is currently offering a number of services under the umbrella of Amazon Web Services.  The services include;

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing scalable virtual private servers using Xen.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing persistent block level storage volumes for EC2.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), providing Web Service based storage for applications.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), providing a hosted message queue for web applications.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), managing small units of work distributed amongst many people.
• Alexa Web Services, providing traffic data, thumbnails, and other information about web sites.
• Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S, formerly Amazon E-Commerce Service or ECS), providing access to Amazon’s product data and electronic commerce functionality.
• Amazon Historical Pricing, providing access to Amazon’s historical sales data from its affiliates.
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS), currently in limited beta[2], provides an interface for micropayments.
• Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.
• Amazon SimpleDB, currently in limited beta, allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3 to provide “the core functionality of a database.”[3]
• Amazon AWS Authentication is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
• Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic API for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment By Amazon.
• Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects stored in S3 to so-called “edge locations” near the requester.
• AWS Management Console (AWS Console), A web-based point and click interface to manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including but not limited to EC2, EBS, S3, and SQS.

I think EC2 is one of the most exciting offerings here.

I have been using EC2 for nearly a year now and I have to say I think it is a game-changing service.  In simple terms it enables anyone to get access to as much or as little server capacity as you want or need.  Once setup correctly it is a couple of mouse clicks to add as many servers as you want.

The cost is very competitive too - based on the assumption that an entry level server has a lifespan of 3 years and needs 300 watts of power to run (+another 300 watts to cool) the comparrisson is roughly as follows;

Traditional Server cost €2,500

Electricity .6Kwh X 26,280 = 15,768 Kwh @€.020 = €3,153

Total Cost €5,653 for 3 years (€157 per month)

Amazon Server Cost 26,280 hours @ US$0.10/h = US$2,628 (€1,946) for 3 years (€54 per month)

There is also a cheaper way of using this called reserved instances. This involves a $500 once off payment and a discount rate of $0.03/hour - that brings the cost down to (€954) for 3 years (€27 per month).

All these calculations are based on the “small instance”

The other point to note here is that you can bring these servers up and down at the click of a mouse, so say for example if you have a business with peak requirements at a given time of year you can temporarily buy extra resources and switch them off when they are no longer required.

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