AWS — Amazon Web Services

Priya Sinha

9 min readJan 12, 2021

— EC2

In this article, I am going to briefly explain about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its key services.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a term referred to storing and accessing data over the internet. It doesn’t store any data on the hard disk of your personal computer. In cloud computing, you can access data from a remote server.

Characteristics of Cloud

On demand self service
Broad Network Access
Scalability
Resource Pooling
Measured Services

Kind of services provided by cloud:

There are 3 services provided by cloud

IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
PaaS — Platform as a Service
SaaS — Software as a Service

IaaS: IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. It provides users with the capability to provision processing, storage, and network connectivity on demand. Using this service model, the customers can develop their own applications on these resources.
PaaS: PaaS stands for Platform as a Service. Here, the service provider provides various services like databases, queues, workflow engines, e-mails, etc. to their customers. The customer can then use these components for building their own applications. The services, availability of resources and data backup are handled by the service provider that helps the customers to focus more on their application’s functionality.
SaaS: SaaS stands for Software as a Service. As the name suggests, here the third-party providers provide end-user applications to their customers with some administrative capability at the application level, such as the ability to create and manage their users. Also some level of customizability is possible such as the customers can use their own corporate logos, colors, etc.

Deployment model of the cloud:

There are three models in the cloud.

Public Cloud
Private Cloud
Hybrid Cloud

Public Cloud:

In public cloud, the third-party service providers make resources and services available to their customers via the Internet. Customer’s data and related security is with the service providers’ owned infrastructure.

Private Cloud

A private cloud also provides almost similar features as a public cloud, but the data and services are managed by the organization or by the third party only for the customer’s organization. In this type of cloud, major control is over the infrastructure so security related issues are minimized.

Hybrid Cloud:

A hybrid cloud is the combination of both private and public cloud. The decision to run on private or public cloud usually depends on various parameters like sensitivity of data and applications, industry certifications and required standards, regulations, etc.

What is AWS?

Amazon web service is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.

Applications of AWS services

Amazon Web services are widely used for various computing purposes like:

Website hosting
Application hosting/SaaS hosting
Media Sharing (Image/ Video)
Mobile and Social Applications
Content delivery and Media Distribution
Storage, backup, and disaster recovery
Development and test environments
Academic Computing
Search Engines
Social Networking

AWS Compute Services

EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud) — EC2 is a virtual machine in the cloud on which you have OS level control. You can run this cloud server whenever you want.
LightSail -This cloud computing tool automatically deploys and manages the computer, storage, and networking capabilities required to run your applications.
Elastic Beanstalk — The tool offers automated deployment and provisioning of resources like a highly scalable production website.
EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) — The tool allows you to Kubernetes on Amazon cloud environment without installation.
AWS Lambda — This AWS service allows you to run functions in the cloud. The tool is a big cost saver for you as you pay only when your functions execute.
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud.
You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual services as you need, configure security, networking and manage storage.
Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or scale down the instances.
Amazon EC2 is having two storage options i.e., EBS (Elastic Block Storage) and instance storage.
Pre configured templates are available known as Amazon machine images.
By default, when you create an EC2 account with Amazon, your account is limited to a maximum of 20 instances per EC2 region with two default high I/O instances.

Types of EC2 instances:

General Purpose Instance
Compute Optimized Instance
Memory Optimized Instance
Storage Optimized Instance
Accelerated Computing / GPU Instance
High Memory Instance
Previous Generation Instance
General purpose instances: General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, and can be used for a variety of workloads.

Instances available in four sizes- Nano, Small, Medium, Large

A1 instances:

A1 instances are ideally suited for scale- out workloads that are supported by the arm ecosystem.

These instances are well- suited for the following application

Web server
Containerized micro services
Caching fleets
Distribute data stores
Application that requires arm instruction set

M4 instances:

The new M4 instances features a custom intel xeon E5–2676 V3 haswell processor optimized specifically for EC2.

VCPU- 2 to 40 (max.)

RAM — 8GB to 160GB (max.)

Instance storage — EBS only

M5, M5a, M5ad, and M5d:

These instances provide an ideal cloud infra, offering a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources for a broad range of applications.

Used in — Gaming server, web server, small and medium databases.

VCPU — 2 to 96 (max.)

RAM — 8 to 384 (max.)

Instance Storage — EBS & NVMe SSD

T2, T3 and T3a instances:

These instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst to a higher level when required by your workload.

An unlimited instances can sustain high CPU performance fro time whenever required

Used for-

Website and web app
Code repositories
Development, build, test
Microservices(like kubernetes & docker)

VCPU — 2 to 8

RAM — 5 to 32GB

2. Compute Optimized Instances (C- series):

Compute optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors.

There are 3 types are available — C4, C5, C5n

C4 instances: C4 instances are optimized for compute intensive workloads and deliver very cost effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio.

VCPU — 2 to 36, RAM — 375 to 60Gb

Storage — EBS only, Network BW — 10Gbps

Use cases- Web server, Batch processing, MMO gaming, video encoding

C5 instances- C5 are optimized for compute intensive workloads and deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio.

VCPU — 2 to 72, RAM — 4 to 192GB

Network BW- upto 25Gbps

Instance Storage — EBS only & NVMe SSD

Use cases — High performance web servers, Gaming, Video encoding

C5 support max. 25EBS volumes

C5 use elastic network adaptor

C5 uses new EC2 hypervisor

3. Memory Optimized:

There are three series in memory optimized.

R- Series
X- Series
Z- Series

Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory.

R4, R5, R5a, R5ad and R5d:

High performance, relational (MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) databases.

Distributed web scale cache stores that provide in-memory caching of key value type data.

Used in financial service, hadoop

VCPU — 2 to 96

RAM — 16 to 768GB

Instance Storage — EBS only & NVMe SSD

X1, X1e Instances:

Well suited for high performance databases, memory intensive enterprise application, relational database workload, SAP HANA.

Electronic design automation

VCPU — 4 to 128

RAM — 122 to 3904 GB

Instance storage — SSD

Z1d Instance:

High frequency Z1d delivers a sustained all core frequency of up to 40GHz, the fastest of any cloud instances.

AWS Nitro system, xenon processor, upto 1.8TB of instance storage.

VCPU — 2 to 48

RAM — 16 to 384Gb

Storage — NVMe SSD

Use cases: Electronic design automation and certain databases workloads with high per-core licensing cost.

4. Storage Optimized Instances-

I Series
D Series
H Series

Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage

They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low latencies. Random I/O operations per second (IOPS) to application.

D2 instances:

Well suited for the following-

Massive Parallel(MPP) data warehouse.
Map reduce and hadoop distributed computing
Log or data processing app

VCPU — 4 to 36

RAM — 30.5 to 244GB

Storage — SSD

H1 Instances:

The family features upto 16TB of HDD based local storage, high disk throughput and balance of compute & memory.

Well suited for apps requiring sequential access to large amounts of data on direct-attached instance storage.
Application that requires high throughput access to large quantities of data.

VCPU — 8 to 64

RAM — 32 to 256GB

Storage — HDD

I3 and I3en instances:

Well suited for-

High frequency online transaction processing system (OLTP)

Relational Databases

NoSQL Databases
Distributed File System
Data Warehousing application

VCPU — 2 to 96

RAM — 16 to 768 GB

Local storage — NVMe SSD

Networking performance — 25Gbps to 100Gbps

Sequential Throughput

Read — 15GB/s

Write — 64GB/s (I3)

8Gb (I3en)

5. Accelerated Computing Instances: Accelerated computing instance families use hardware accelerators, or co-processors to perform some function such as floating point pattern matching more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.

F1 instance:

F1 instances offers customizable hardware acceleration with field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)

Each FPGA contains 2.5 million logic elements & 6800 DSP engines.
Designed to accelerate computationally intensive algorithms, such as data flow or highly parallel operations.
F1 provides local NVMe SSD storage

VCPU — 8 to 64

FPGA — 1 to 8

RAM — 122 to 976GB

Storage — NVMe SSD

Used in- Genomics research, financial analytics, real time video processing & Big data search.
P2 & P3 Instances:

It uses NVIDIA Tesla GPU.

Provide high bandwidth networking.
Upto 32GB of memory per GPU, which makes them ideal for deep learning & computational fluid dynamics.

Used in — Machine learning, Database seismic analysis, Genomics, Molecular modelling, AI, Deep learning.

Note: P3 support CUDA9 & openCL APIs P2 supports CUDA8 and open CL12

G2 & G3 instances:

Optimized for graphics intensive application.

Well suited for app like 3D visualisation
G3 instances use NVIDIA tesla M60 GPU and provide a cost effective, high performance platform for graphics applications.

VCPU — 4 to 64

GPU — 1 to 4

RAM — 305 to 488GB

GPU memory — 8 to 32GB

Network Performance — 25Gbps

Used in — Video creation services, 3D visualisation, streaming graphics intensive application.

6. High Memory Instances-

High memory instances are purpose built to run large in memory databases, including production development of SAP HANA in the cloud.

Features:

Latest generation intel xeon pentium 8176M processor.
6, 9, 12TB of instance memory, the largest of any EC2 instance.
Powered by AWS nitro system, a combination of dedicated hardware & lightweight hypervisor.
Base metal performance with direct access to host hardware.
EBS optimized by default at no additional cost model no. U-6tb1 metal, U-9tb1 & U-12tb1 metal
Network performance — 25Gbps

Dedicated EBS bandwidth — 14Gbps