Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. As written in the EC2 post, the instance stores are temporary storage. The Instance stores may get deleted if the instance terminates or of there is a disk failure. Each EBS volume is automatically replicated within its availability zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes are available in a variety of types that differ in performance characteristics and price.

Types of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes

Magnetic Volumes

They obviously have the lowest performance however, they are the cheapest. This is ideal where workloads or data is accessed infrequently.

General Purpose SSD

General purpose SSD provide cost-effective storage that is ideal for broad range of workloads. They deliver strong performance at moderate price point that is suitable for a wide range of workloads. General purpose SSD can provide a baseline performance upto 3000 IOPS.

Provisioned IOPS SSD

These are designed to meet the needs of I/O intensive workloads, particularly database workloads that are sensitive to storage performance and consistency. They can provide a speed of even 20K IOPS.

Backup / Recovery

You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes, regardless of volume type, by taking point-in-time snapshot. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your most recent snapshot are stored.

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a primary web service provided by AWS and it provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. Compute refers to the computational power required to fulfill your work. Amazon EC2 allows you to acquired compute power through launching of virtual servers called as instances. When you launch an instance, you make use of the compute power as you need. AWS charges you based on the compute power that you have chosen. There are two considerations that you make while launching instances on AWS

1. The amount of virtual hardware dedicated to the instance
2. The software loaded on the instance

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instance types

There are many instances on AWS based on varying dimentsons of

1. Virtual CPUs
2. Memory
3. Storage
4. Network Performance

Instance Families

Instances are grouped into Families based on the ratio of the values of the dimensions mentioned above. Within each family, there are several choices that scale up linearly in size. Once you choose a instance family you cannot change it until you do some significant migration exercise.

Example of a instance family in AWS is shown below

For more information on instance types of AWS, click on the link.

Instance Pricing Options

On Demand EC2 Instances

AWS allows a very flexible pricing option and this does not require any upfront commitment. The customer has full control over when the instance is launched and when it is terminated.

Reserved Instances

This option enables the customer to make capacity reservations for predictable workloads. By using reserved instances for these workloads, the customer can save a lot of money as compared to the On-Demand instances. There are two factors which determine the cost of reservation

1. The term of commitment – Longer the commitment, the bigger the discount.
2. Payment Option – All upfront, Partial upfront, no upfront. All upfront gives maximum discount

Spot Instances

This option is for workloads that are not time critical. Spot instances offer the greatest discount. With spot instances, the customers specify what price they are ready to pay. When customer’s bid price is more than the current Spot price, the customer will receive the requested instance.

Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) Enhanced Networking

For workloads requiring greater network performance, many instance types support Enhanced Networking. Enhanced networking reduces the impact of virtualization on network performance by enabling a capabilities which result in

1. Improved packets per second (PPS)
2. Lower Latency
3. Less Jitter

Instance Store

The instance storage is a temporary storage. The data in the instance store is lost when

• Underlying disk fails
• The instance stops
• The instance terminates

You need to use the S3 or Elastic Block Store (EBS) for persistent data.

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The need for dedicated infrastructure is going away with cloud. Cloud computing is about using a shared hardware hosted by some provider. The development team is then abstracted from the infrastructure. Infrastructure in the modern days are looked at as

• Computing Capacity (CPU)
• Memory (RAM)
• Storage (Hard Drive)

Cloud computing allows a provider to use the hardware from a provider such as Amazon.

What is AWS?

Cloud services are provided by Amazon and they are called Amazon Web Services (AWS). These services are used by many providers to use infrastructure from a vendor such as Amazon. The services provided are many

AWS Compute and Networking Services

Networking and computing services to deliver core functionality for businesses are provided by AWS compute and networking services.  These compute and networking services can be leveraged with the database, storage and application services to provide solutions to business in a end-to-end way.

AWS Storage and Content Delivery

Amazon S3, Amazon Cloudfront and Amazon Elastic Block Store are some of the useful AWS Storage and Content delivery services.

AWS Database Services

AWS provides Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Dynamo DB – basically any database that a individual might need. On demand database services have reduced the need for dedicated database infrastructure for many vendors.

AWS Application Services

AWS provides a variety of managed services to use with applications such as Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Simple Email service (SES) etc.

Please refer to the following links to know more about Amazon AWS

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

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