Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Web address	aws.amazon.com
Type of site	Web service, cloud computing
Owner	Amazon.com
Launched	2006[1]

Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a collection of cloud computing services that make up the on-demand computing platform offered by Amazon.com. These services operate from 12 geographical regions^[2] across the world. The most central and best-known of these services arguably include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2", and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3". AWS now has more than 70 services that range from compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management and mobile. Amazon markets AWS as a service to provide large computing capacity quicker and cheaper than a client company building an actual physical server farm.^[3]

Architecture

Map showing the approximate geographical regions used by Amazon Web Services.

AWS is located in 12 geographical "regions": US East (Northern Virginia), where the majority of AWS servers are based,^[4] US West (northern California), US West (Oregon), Brazil (São Paulo), Europe (Ireland and Germany), Southeast Asia (Singapore), East Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing) and Australia (Sydney). There is also a "GovCloud", based in the Northwestern United States, provided for U.S. government customers, complementing existing government agencies already using the US East Region.^[5] AWS has announced another 5 Regions (and 11 Availability Zones) in Canada, China, India, Ohio, and the United Kingdom coming online throughout the next year.^[6] Each Region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated Region.^[7]

Each Region has multiple "Availability Zones", which are distinct data centers providing AWS services. Availability Zones are isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between Zones. Several services operate across Availability Zones (e.g., S3, DynamoDB) while others can be configured to replicate across Zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from failures. As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 Million servers across 28 availability zones.^[8]

The global network of AWS Edge locations consists of 54 points of presence worldwide, including locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.^[6]

In 2014, AWS committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage.^[9] As part of this effort in the United States, AWS commissioned with Community Energy of Virginia a solar farm coming online in 2016 to support the US East region.^[10] In January 2015, AWS announced it has teamed with Pattern Development to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge. In July 2015, AWS announced that it has contracted with Iberdrola Renewables, LLC to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US East. In November 2015, AWS announced that it has contracted with EDP Renewables to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US Central.^[11] AWS is also working with Tesla Motors to apply battery storage technology to address some power needs in the US West (Northern California) region.^[10]

History

AWS Summit 2013 event in NYC.

Officially launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services provides online services for other web sites or client-side applications.^[1] Most of these services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality that other developers can use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol. All services are billed based on usage, but how usage is measured for billing varies from service to service.

In late 2003, Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper describing a vision for Amazon's retail computing infrastructure that was completely standardized, completely automated, and would rely extensively on web services for services such as storage, drawing on internal work already underway. Near the end they mentioned the possibility of selling virtual servers as a service, proposing the company could generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment.^[12] The first AWS service launched for public usage was Simple Queue Service in November 2004.^[13] Amazon EC2 was built by a team in Cape Town, South Africa, under Pinkham and lead developer Chris Brown.^[14]

In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 180,000 developers had signed up to use Amazon Web Services.^[15]

In November 2010, it was reported that all of Amazon.com retail web services had been moved to AWS.^[16]

On April 20, 2011, some parts of Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage. A portion of volumes using the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service became "stuck" and were unable to fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for service to be fully restored.^[17] On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to a severe storm of historic proportions in Northern Virginia, where AWS' largest datacenter cluster is located.^[18]

On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others. The cause was a latent memory leak bug in an operational data collection agent.^[19] On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage, causing websites such as Netflix instant video to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States.^[20] AWS later issued a statement^[21] detailing the issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that led up to the outage.

In November 2012, AWS hosted its first customer event in Las Vegas.^[22] On April 30, 2013, AWS began offering a certification program for computer engineers with expertise in cloud computing.^[23]

AWS revenue was not stated separately in the past, but in 2012 it was estimated by industry watchers at over $1.5 billion.^[24]

On May 13, 2013, AWS was awarded an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).^[25]

In October 2013, it was revealed that AWS was awarded a $600M contract with the CIA.^[26]

During August 2014, AWS received Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions.^[27]

In April 2015, AWS was reported to be profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year, and $265 million of operating income. Founder Jeff Bezos described it as a fast-growing $5 billion business; analysts described it as "surprisingly more profitable than forecast".^[28] In October 2015, Amazon.com said in its Q3 earnings report that AWS's operating income was $521 million, with operating margins at 25 percent. AWS's Q3 2015 revenue was $2.1 billion, a 78% increase from Q3 2014's revenue of $1.17 billion.^[29] Q4 2015 revenue for the AWS segment increased 69.5% y/y to $2.4 billion with 28.5% operating margin, making AWS a $9.6 billion run rate. In Q1 2016, revenue was $2.57 billion with net income of $604 million, a 64% increase over Q1 2015 that resulted in AWS being more profitable than Amazon's North American retail business for the first time.^[30]

In 2015, Gartner estimated that AWS customers are deploying 10x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers.^[31] During the 2015 re:Invent keynote, AWS disclosed that they have more than a million active customers every month in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 education institutions and more than 17,500 nonprofits.

AWS adoption has increased since launch in 2006. Notable customers include NASA,^[32] the Obama Campaign,^[33] Pinterest,^[34] Kempinski Hotels,^[35] Netflix,^[36] Infor^[37] and the CIA.^[38]

AWS Engineer James Hamilton created a ten year timeline of the online service.^[39]

List of products

Compute

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable virtual private servers using Xen.
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) allows businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cheaply process vast amounts of data. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.
• Amazon Lambda (LAMBDA)^[40] provides a compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources needed to run the code.^[41]

Networking

• Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) creates a logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances which can be connected to an existing network using a VPN connection.
• AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections into AWS data centers, providing faster and cheaper data throughput.
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

Content delivery

• Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects to so-called "edge locations" near the requester

Storage and content delivery

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides Web Service based storage.
• Amazon Glacier provides a low-cost, long-term storage option (compared to S3). High redundancy and availability, but low-frequent access times. Intended for archiving data.
• AWS Storage Gateway, an iSCSI block storage virtual appliance with cloud-based backup.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2.
• AWS Import/Export, accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport.
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

Database

• Amazon DynamoDB provides a scalable, low-latency NoSQL online Database Service backed by SSDs.
• Amazon ElastiCache provides in-memory caching for web applications. This is Amazon's implementation of Memcached and Redis.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a scalable database server with MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL support.^[42]
• Amazon Redshift provides petabyte-scale data warehousing with column-based storage and multi-node compute.
• Amazon SimpleDB allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3 to provide "the core functionality of a database".
• AWS Data Pipeline provides reliable service for data transfer between different AWS compute and storage services (e.g., Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR). In other words, this service is simply a data-driven workload management system, which provides a simple management API for managing and monitoring of data-driven workloads in cloud applications.^[43]
• Amazon Kinesis streams data in real time with the ability to process thousands of data streams on a per-second basis. The service, designed for real-time apps, allows developers to pull any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up or down as needed (similar in functionality to Apache Kafka).
• Amazon Aurora provides a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that has been created specifically for the AWS infrastructure that claims faster speeds and lower costs that are realized in larger databases.

Deployment

• AWS CloudFormation provides a declarative template-based Infrastructure as Code model for configuring AWS.^[44]
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides quick deployment and management of applications in the cloud.
• AWS OpsWorks provides configuration of EC2 services using Chef.
• AWS CodeDeploy provides automated code deployment to EC2 instances.

Management

• Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
• AWS Directory Service a managed service that allows you to connect AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud.
• Amazon CloudWatch, provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, starting with EC2.
• 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, SQS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon also makes available a mobile application for Android which has support for some of the management features from the console.
• Amazon CloudHSM - The AWS CloudHSM service helps to meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS) a managed service to create and control encryption keys.
• Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) a highly scalable, fast, container management service, using on Docker containers.

Application services

• Amazon API Gateway is a service for publishing, maintaining and securing web service APIs.
• Amazon CloudSearch provides basic full-text search and indexing of textual content.
• Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta version, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.^[45]
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder (ETS) provides video transcoding of S3 hosted videos, marketed primarily as a way to convert source files into mobile-ready versions.
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) provides an interface for micropayments.
• Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides bulk and transactional email sending.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a hosted message queue for web applications.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) provides a hosted multi-protocol "push" messaging for applications.
• Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications.
• Amazon Cognito a simple user identity and data synchronization service that helps you securely manage and synchronize app data for users across their mobile devices.^[46]
• Amazon AppStream a flexible, low-latency service that lets you stream resource intensive applications and games from the cloud.

Analytics

• Amazon Machine Learning a service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology.
• Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed, cloud-based service for real-time data processing over large, distributed data streams.^[47]

Miscellaneous

• Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic web service for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon. This service will no longer be supported by Amazon. All of the functionality of this service is now transferred to Amazon marketplace Web service.
• Amazon Historical Pricing provides access to Amazon's historical sales data from its affiliates. (It appears that this service has been discontinued.)
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) manages small units of work distributed among many persons.
• Amazon Product Advertising API formerly known as Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S) and Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), provides access to Amazon's product data and electronic commerce functionality.
• Amazon Gift Code On Demand (AGCOD) for Corporate Customers^[48] enables companies to distribute Amazon gift cards (gift codes) instantly in any denomination, integrating Amazon's gift-card technology into customer loyalty, employee incentive and payment disbursement platforms.
• AWS Partner Network (APN) provides technology partners and consulting partners with the technical information and sales and marketing support to increase business opportunities through AWS and with businesses using AWS. Launched in April 2012, the APN is made up of Technology Partners including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), tool providers, platform providers, and others.^[49][50][51] Consulting Partners include System Integrators (SIs), agencies, consultancies, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and others. Potential Technology and Consulting Partners must meet technical and non-technical training requirements set by AWS.^[52]
• Amazon Lumberyard is a free triple-A game engine that is integrated with AWS.^[53]

Pop-up lofts

In June 2014 AWS opened their first Pop-up Loft, in San Francisco, to help businesses discover their services.^[54] In August 2015 they expanded to New York City,^[55][56] and in September 2015 expanded to Berlin.^[57] AWS opened their fourth location, in Tel Aviv from March 1, 2016 to March 22, 2016.^[58] A Pop-up Loft will open in London, from April 18, 2016 to April 28, 2016.

References

1. "Amazon Web Services About Us". Amazon.com. September 2011. Retrieved 16 May 2012.
2. "AWS Global Infrastructure". 2016-01-11. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
3. "What is Cloud Computing by Amazon Web Services | AWS". Aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
4. Rich Miller. "Estimate: Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers". Data Center Knowledge.
5. "FAQs". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
6. "Global Infrastructure". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
7. "AWS Customer Agreement". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
8. "Just how big is Amazon’s AWS business? (hint: it’s absolutely massive)". Geek.com. Retrieved 2014-12-22.
9. Pomerantz, David. "AWS and Sustainable Energy". Amazon. Retrieved 15 June 2015.
10. Burt, Jeffrey (10 June 2015). "AWS to Build Solar Farm to Help Power Cloud Data Centers". eWeek.
11. "AWS & Sustainability". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
12. "Benjamin Black – EC2 Origins". Blog.b3k.us. 2009-01-25. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
13. "Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon Simple Queue Service Beta". Aws.typepad.com. 2004-11-09. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
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19. "Summary of the October 22, 2012 AWS Service Event in the US-East Region". Aws.amazon.com. 2012-10-22. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
20. Bishop, Bryan. "Netflix streaming down on some devices due to Amazon issues". The Verge. Retrieved 5 February 2013.
21. "Summary of the December 24, 2012 Amazon ELB Service Event in the US-East Region". Aws.amazon.com. 2012-12-24. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
22. "Amazon Web Services Announces First Global Customer and Partner Conference: AWS re: Invent". aws.amazon.com. 2012-05-09. Retrieved 2014-01-20.
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25. "AWS was awarded an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)". www.gsa.gov. 2013-05-13. Retrieved 2013-11-08.
26. "US court rules for Amazon.com in CIA cloud contract dispute". Reuters. 2013-10-08. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
27. "AWS GovCloud Earns DoD CSM Level 3-5 Provisional Authorization". blogs.aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
28. "Amazon web services 'growing fast'". BBC News.
29. Get Used to Amazon Being a Profitable Company Wired. October 22, 2015.
30. Amazon’s earnings soar as its hardware takes the spotlight The Verge, Retrieved 28 April 2016.
31. "Gartner Reprint". www.gartner.com. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
32. "The tech behind NASA's Martian chronicles -- GCN".
33. "Log In - The New York Times".
34. "Pinterest Case Study". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
35. "How Kempinski Hotels used cloud to improve staff efficiency". Cloud Pro.
36. "Netflix Case Study". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
37. Derek du Preez. "Infor hits back at criticism of AWS for CloudSuite". diginomica.
38. "AWS to resume CIA cloud project -- FCW".
39. Timeline of AWS' 10 year history.
40. Ankit Giri. "Introduction To AWS LAMBDA". TO THE NEW BLOG.
41. "AWS Lambda". Amazon Web Services. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
42. Jack Clark (15 November 2013). "Make room, guys. Here comes the Postgres with the mostess on AWS". The Register. Retrieved 2013-11-22.
43. AWS Data Pipeline. Aws.amazon.com. Retrieved on 2013-08-09.
44. AWS in Action & Wittig (2016), p. 112.
45. "Amazon Customer Service". qwiknumbers. Retrieved 2016-05-06.
46. "Amazon Web Services". AWS Products. Amazon Web Services. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
47. "Amazon Kinesis". Amazon Web Services. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
48. Amazon Media Room: Press Releases. Phx.corporate-ir.net. Retrieved on 2013-08-09.
49. Darrow, Barb. Amazon, seeking to relieve partner angst, launches partner program, GigaOM, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013
50. Ricknäs, Mikael. Amazon lays groundwork for AWS Partner Network, Computerworld, IDG, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013
51. Sharwood, Simon. Amazon Web services revamps partner program, The Register, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013
52. Miller, Kate (2014-11-21). "New 2015 requirements for APN partners". Amazon. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
53. Takahashi, Dean (February 12, 2016). "Inside Amazon’s decision to make a video game engine". VentureBeat. Retrieved February 20, 2016.
54. Head in the cloud: Amazon Web Services’ SoMa pop-up now permanent
55. Why Amazon Added a Pop-Up Loft in NYC
56. Like Target and Porsche, Amazon Web Services opens pop-up shop in NYC
57. Amazon Web Services opens Pop-up Loft in Berlin
58. Amazon's Pop-up loft heading to Tel Aviv

External links

• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon Web Services Events
• Amazon Web Services's channel on YouTube