Storage is one of the key resources offered as a Cloud Service. By moving data to the Cloud, there are quite a few benefits. Some of them include:

1. Illusion of unlimited storage – Unlike hosting, Cloud storage will virtually give you access to unlimited storage. You will never run out of space on the Cloud.

2. Better scalability – Most of the Cloud storage offerings have a supplementary Content Distribution Network (CDN) that will replicate the static content on their edge server running across the globe. This offers you ultimate scalability.

3.Accessible storage – Because the storage is moved to the Cloud, you can easily integrate that with desktop, web and mobile applications. Cloud Storage APIs are based on standard web protocols like SOAP and REST.

4.Pay-By-Use – The biggest advantage of moving the storage to the Cloud is cost. There is no upfront cost and you will pay only for what you have used. This will help you manage your costs effectively.

5.Reliable and secure storage – Cloud storage is very reliable because it is decentralized and redundant. Most of the vendors replicate their content across multiple physical servers running in multiple physical locations. This makes it more reliable and secure.

In this article, I will introduce you to Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3. The objective is to make you understand the key concepts of S3.

True to its name, Amazon S3 is very simple to understand. Though it is simple, it is extremely powerful. To get the best out of it, you should understand the core concepts of S3 and also the way you should design your application to leverage it.

To get started with S3, go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3 and complete the sign up process. Please make a note of your Access Key and Secret Key.
Visit http://www.CloudBerryLab.com and download the CloudBerry S3 Explorer Freeware. This will give you an intuitive and well designed UI to interact with the S3 Service.

Now that we have the subscription and the right tool with us, let’s take a look at S3.
At a high level, you should have the knowledge of Buckets, Objects and the Access Control List (ACL). Let’s take a closer look at these concepts.

Bucket – Think of the Bucket as the highest level container on the S3 system. Because the Bucket is created at the root level, it got to be unique across the global namespace. The preferred way of creating the unique bucket name is to base it on your domain name which is already unique on the web. AWS imposes a restriction of 100 buckets per account. But with the right design and planning, this would not be a major limitation. Buckets form the integral part of the URI to access the resources on S3. For example, if the bucket name is media.cloud9show, the URI to access it is http://media. cloud9show.s3.amazonaws.com. With the combination of DNS and CNAME, you can completely hide the actual S3 URL and map it your custom domain URLs. Buckets can also have permissions assigned to them in the form of Access Control List (ACL).

Objects – The only hierarchy that S3 has is Buckets and Objects. Buckets contain Objects. These objects can be anything from an image to a serialized Java or .NET object. Each Object can be 5GB in size and can contain up to 2KB of metadata. Every object is URL addressable. The typical format of the URL is http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/object. Let’s say we stored a video called screencast.mpg in a bucket called media.cloud9show, the valid URL is http://media.cloud9show.s3.amazonaws.com/screencast.mpg. Objects can also have keys to uniquely identify them. These keys can be up to 1024 bytes in length. An Object’s key name can contain special characters including a forward slash (/). By using a common key delimited by a forward slash, a folder/file like hierarchy can be established. Remember that this is a clever way of using the naming conventions to emulate the folder and file hierarchy. Like Buckets, even the Objects are accessible based on the ACL that is set. If an object has an ACL that allows the public access, they can be accessed through a browser or through the REST based code.
Cloud Berry Explorer let’s me create a folder. But understand that this is not really a folder. It is emulating the folder by creating a key followed by a forward slash.

It’s time for us to understand the concept of ACL.

Access Control List – Every resource in S3 service has an ACL associated with it. When an Object or a Bucket is created, the default ACL marks these resources as private, which implies that you as an owner have full control over it and no one else can access or modify it. Every time a request is made, S3 will authenticate and also checks the ACL to grant access to the Bucket or the Object. An ACL grant consists of one grantee and just one permission. By default, when a Bucket or Object is created on S3, the Owner has FULL_CONTROL permission. Remember that the Bucket’s ACL doesn’t propagate to individual Objects. You need to explicitly define the ACLs for Buckets and Objects separately.

So, that’s the quick introduction to Amazon S3 Service. To quickly recap, we discussed Buckets as containers, Objects as the resources within Buckets and ACLs that define the permissions.

In the coming posts, I will be discussing how to programmatically access and manipulate S3 resources. I will walk you through an end-to-end scenario of building a Jukebox on the Cloud.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• Overview of Amazon Web Services
• Do We Need ODBC for the Cloud?
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com
• Top 5 Things Microsoft Should Fix in Azure
• Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?

Harshad Oak, founder of Rightrix Solutions runs a Technology Portal called IndicThreads.com. IndicThreads is synonymous with the popular, independent annual Java conference conducted at Pune.

They approached me for an interview on Cloud Computing. You can find it here.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• Top 10 Myths of Cloud Computing
• A Case for Private PaaS
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Cloud Personas and Their Concerns

It’s been just over a week since Microsoft has started to offer the commercial subscription of Windows Azure. As a Cloud enthusiast, I quickly signed up for the Introductory Special subscription and downloaded the required tools to deploy my first app to the Cloud. I had access to Windows Azure since PDC08 and I deployed quite a few apps to test the functionality and features of the platform. As an independent Cloud Computing Strategist, I also explore Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Having worked on a few mature Cloud Computing platforms and tools, I had certain expectations from Windows Azure particularly after it has gone past the beta phase. Honestly, there is no significant difference (except the pricing part) that I could notice in the development and deployment experience on Windows Azure.

Here is a list of top 5 things that I feel Microsoft should fix immediately.

5) Metering and Billing Model – Microsoft would start charging the moment you deploy your app even if it is not running and not consuming any resources. Refer to the FAQ on pricing for more details. I personally find this as a huge entry barrier. Ideally, I wouldn’t want to get charged when my app is in ‘Suspended’ mode and not in ‘Run’ mode. Technically speaking, what resources would my app consume when it is not running? It would only be a few megabytes of storage to keep the package and the configuration files. Amazon doesn’t charge me VM hours for inactive AMIs. They only charge me for the nominal storage cost of storing the AMI on S3. Charging VM hours for an idle application is just not convincing enough. I find it to be counterproductive and a barrier for developers to embrace this platform.

Azure Pricing

4) Simpler Pricing and Subscription Plans – Microsoft is at it again! After confusing the consumers with half-a-dozen flavors of Windows Vista and recently with Windows 7, they are doing it to their Online Services subscribers. There are at least 4 types of subscription to choose from – Introductory Special, Development Accelerator Core, Development Accelerator Extended and ‘Pay As You Go’ Consumption. This bouquet of subscription offers is confusing and not a straightforward model. This reflects the classic Microsoft way of packaging and licensing products in the form of Express, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. This doesn’t gel with the online services model. I personally prefer the Amazon way of pricing and the sign up process. Simple and straightforward!

3) Agile Deployment and Faster Change Management – On the commercial version of Windows Azure, it takes more than 7 minutes for the application to be available and accessible. And, I am not talking of an Azure application built to assist NASA launch the Mars Rover. This is a plain and simple Hello World ASP.NET app that doesn’t even have a single line of server side code. Add a Worker Role, few lines of dynamic code and storage access code, it will take a good 10 minutes for your application to take off. Again, comparing this with Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, they are almost instant. Each Linux EC2 AMI takes about 2 min. to boot and I am at the root prompt in no time. Windows Azure is a PaaS offering and I cannot afford to wait for few minutes every time I make a trivial change to my HTML file. I can understand if Amazon forces me to go through this as I may have to bundle the AMI with every change that I make. With EBS now supporting booting AMIs, I need not even worry about bundling the AMI. Windows Azure might also be doing the job of spinning the new VMs for every change that I make to the app or the configuration. But I don’t care and cannot wait for 10 minutes for the simple changes to reflect. This needs to be fixed!

2) Configuration Editor – After you deploy the Cloud application, you may need to change the configuration settings. This includes changing the no. of instances of Web Role / Worker Role or changing a custom configuration setting. Having a plain vanilla textbox to change the sensitive configuration setting is just not acceptable! Microsoft has every reason to put up a better frontend to manage the configuration settings that can be potentially built using Silverlight. At least that will drive more downloads of Silverlight plugin. One look at the Configuration settings textbox makes me feel that I am working on an early CTP release. I consider the EC2 Console from Amazon (and a bunch of 3rd party tools like ElasticFox) and ElasticHosts’ configuration editor to be much better. Though Microsoft may want to encourage partners like RightScale to eventually build such tools, as a paid subscriber I deserve a better tool here!

Azure Configuration Interface

AWS Console

ElasticHosts Configuration

1) Windows Azure Integration with Visual Studio – This certainly deserves to be the numero uno. The biggest USP of Microsoft is its integrated platform and tools approach. Whether it is core .NET Development, Microsoft Office Development, BizTalk Adapter Development or SharePoint Development, it has always been the ‘Better Together’ story for the developers by putting Visual Studio in the center. When it comes to Azure, I had a lot of expectations from Microsoft on the Visual Studio integration. The reason for that is Azure is logically an extended development platform on the Cloud and the developers should be able to seamlessly deploy their new breed of applications. To my surprise, Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 1.1 has little to no integration with the real Azure platform. When I right click on the Cloud Service project and select Publish, I expected Visual Studio to prompt me for my Windows Live ID to enumerate the Hosted Service project to seamlessly deploy the app onto Azure and then take me to the Development Portal to let me decide between staging and production. The approach of opening an Explorer window with the folder containing the .cspkg and .cscfg files and launching the browser with the Azure development portal appears to be so broken! Compare this with the Eclipse and the Google plugin integration. Two independent entities coming from different companies offer a better experience to the developers than Azure Tools for VS. When I click on the GAE button on Eclipse toolbar, it just does the deployment after prompting me for the Google ID and the Application ID. I am not sure if this would get fixed in Visual Studio 2010. But as of now, on the currently available Visual Studio 2008 SP1, it is not in place. I want Visual Studio to fully support me end to end during my Cloud application design, development, testing and deployment. I also expect an integrated Azure Storage tool within Visual Studio. I should be able to browse and manipulate the Tables, Blob metadata and the Queues. Today I have to rely on 3rd party tools for this which doesn’t make the developer productive. Overall, Visual Studio and Azure integration has a long way to go!

Google App Engine Deployment

Google App Engine Deployment

Visual Studio Publish

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com
• Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?

Till now I have discussed various technical aspects of the Cloud. Going forward I will also cover certain business aspects related to the Cloud. In this article, I want to analyze the opportunity for the Cloud vendors in India. We will first take a look at the ecosystem, the opportunity map and then the potential for the Cloud service providers.

It may be too early to decide who would actually win the battle. Cloud Computing is in its nascent stage and hasn’t gone past the awareness phase. Not many decision makers understand the terminology of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and the differences between Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. This is an attempt to analyze the current scenario and align the offerings of major Cloud Service Providers with the needs of the ecosystem.

Indian Subcontinent is a very unique and a potent geography for platform vendors. The reason for that is the presence of an end to end IT ecosystem. Let’s take a closer look at who is a part of this thriving ecosystem. At a broad level, there are entities that buy software and services. Let’s call them ‘Customers’. Then, we have another entity that develops and sells software or services. Let’s call them ‘Service Providers’. And finally, we have an entity which is the ‘Community’ that cuts across the ‘Customers’ and the ‘Service Providers’. Let me elaborate more on these three entities.

Customers – This entity is the most critical and influential. Customers pay the Service Providers and keep the ecosystem healthy and active. You can easily attach a brand name to all the categories that I am mentioning here. Think of ICICI, ONGC, BPCL, Bharti Enterprises, Reliance Industries, Maruti Udyog, RPG, Aditya Birla Group, Apollo Healthcare, Dr. Reddy’s Labs, Yash Raj Films, NDTV and TV18 to name a few.

1. Financial Organizations
2. Government
3. Telecommunication Providers
4. Manufacturing companies
5. Small and Medium companies
6. Retail companies
7. Healthcare
8. Education institutions
9. IT and IT Enabled Services
10. Media

Service Providers – Many countries invest in IT. But India not only invests in IT as a customer but it is also the home for many global players who build great software products or provide niche services to their global clientele. Some of the large brands that you can associate with this entity include Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Mahindra Satyam, Cognizant, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google, SAP, Tally, Ramco Systems, Wings, Persistent, Symphony, Hungama, Web Chutney, Web Dunia, Rediff and CricInfo to name a few. Here is the classification of this entity:

1. System Integrators
2. Global Product Companies (India Development Centers)
3. Independent Software Vendors
4. Offshore Product Development companies
5. Web Services and Content providers
6. Value Added Service Providers
7. Social Media / Digital Marketing agencies

Community – This entity is special. This consists of multiple groups of individuals coming from both the entities that we discussed above. Think of software developers who write code for an internal IT application of a bank and another developer who contributes to the next major version of an ERP and yet another developer who is a freelancer. Though their nature of work is different, their needs are exactly the same. Similarly, we have IT administrators. Another important community is the academic community. Some of the renowned and the most respected professors advise banks and the government on their IT strategy and roadmap. These communities are very important for the software platform vendors. The influencers present in these communities can impact the platform adoption in the medium to longer term. Not convinced? Think of this – today’s developer is tomorrow’s decision maker and can decide which platform and tools to adopt for his team. Non-IT related individuals who are knowledge workers and consumers are also a part of the community. Here is a list of a few communities:

1. Developers
2. IT Professionals / Administrators
3. Students
4. Professors
5. Designers
6. Consumers

If you are wondering what all this classification has to do with Cloud adoption in India, let me explain you why this matters.

Cloud is clearly the meta-platform or the platform of the platforms. If Windows or Linux can host Java or .NET to run line-of-business applications, Cloud actually hosts that Windows OS or Linux! It is very evident that for the success of any platform, it is important to have a strategy that can positively impact most of the ecosystem. Here, I give the credit to Microsoft. Microsoft is hugely successful because it got the platform story right. In the mid 90s, it made developers rally behind Visual Basic and then subsequently around the .NET platform. It enabled and empowered ISVs to develop applications on top of Windows and Office and let them target the huge customer base. Microsoft also opened the doors to System Integrators at multiple levels to customize and implement its products. In the current context, Apple is reemphasizing this phenomenon through the iPhone platform. Millions of apps are being developed and sold through the AppStore to all the iPhone customers and a lot of developers are making money through this. Bottom line – Whoever figures out the right story that impacts the maximum players of the ecosystem will win the battle!

Now, let’s turn the scene back to India. Why should Cloud vendors take India seriously? Here are some points:

1) India hasn’t hit the saturation levels yet. Unlike Americas and EMEA, India and APAC have ample scope for IT adoption. This market has a huge, untapped potential at every level – Let that be enterprise, Public Sector or ITES.

2) India is a playground and a test bed to pilot strategic adoption techniques. No other geography will give the platform vendor access to the whole ecosystem. Want to engage with ISVs and excite them to develop on your platform? Well, India is the place to go. Do you need a mature developer community to pilot a SDK adoption plan? Want to setup a Center of Excellence to showcase the capabilities of your platform? Go, talk to Infosys or Wipro!

3) The Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) story is just warming up. Some of the inherent problems that India has been grappling with can now turn into a great opportunity for Cloud vendors. Think of how you can empower the clusters of small businesses through the Cloud and you have a winning story there. Convince the academic institutes to subscribe to Cloud Services that provide student / teacher / parent collaboration on subscription. Read CK Prahlad’s ‘The Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid’ to realize the potential that the Indian SME and the consumer has.

Having seen the uniqueness that India possesses, it is time for me to introduce the players of the game. I personally feel the following vendors have the potential to participate in this (listed in alphabetic order):

• Amazon
• Google
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Salesforce.com
• Oracle / Sun
• VMware

Amazon – As a developer and Cloud Computing Strategist, I have tremendous respect for Amazon. Amazon scores high in their mature developer APIs and comprehensive service offering. As on date, they are the only provider to offer everything from a VM (EC2) to CDN (CloudFront) as a service on subscription. As an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, Amazon can have a meaningful discussion with any entity all the way from the government to a startup. They do not interfere with the customer’s platform decision and in fact it is the only company that has gracefully partnered with the key players of the industry including Microsoft, IBM, Ubuntu, RedHat, Oracle and SUN. But Amazon lacks a solid India story. They do not have a sales and business development team in India and thus missing the opportunity to strengthen the engagement with the customers, partners and the community. The day Amazon sets up their Indian office, I am very sure that they will give the competition a run for their money.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: Public Cloud
Type of Service: IaaS
Key Offerings: EC2, S3, SimpleDB and MapReduce
Current India Story: Weak
Future Potential – Moderate (due to lack of presence in India)

Google – This is 100% pure Cloud company – so much so that they want their browser to be the OS. Google plays in two areas – 1) Software as a Service (SaaS) and, 2) Platform as a Service (PaaS). Through Google Apps, they have targeted the enterprise to switch them from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. Google’s SaaS strategy for India is like an undercurrent. They do not make much noise but have been quietly nibbling away Microsoft’s Exchange and Office revenue. They are currently targeting the SME segment which is a low hanging fruit for Google Apps migration. Google lacks proper partner angle. They do not have a model by which they can delegate the pre-sales and deployment to an array of skilled partners. On the developer engagement model, I run the Google’s developer group in Bangalore called GTUG. I have also felt that Google’s effort to evangelize App Engine to developer community is not scalable enough. Not many Indian developers are familiar and comfortable designing and deploying applications on GAE. Their engagement model for System Integrators is largely opaque. All in all, Google can do better in strengthening its partner model and developer engagement.

Summary-
Type of Cloud: Public Cloud
Type of Service: SaaS and PaaS
Key Offerings: Google Apps and Google App Engine
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – High

IBM – As on date, IBM is not a player on the Public Cloud front. Though they have opened up a developer beta for Public Cloud and also have paid IBM AMIs on Amazon EC2, IBM still focuses on the Private Cloud. With their strong partnership model and as a long-term enterprise player, they have a very credible and convincing story. IBM is leveraging its relationship with Global System Integrators (GSIs) from India to influence some of the large Private Cloud deployments. Their recent announcement of Lotus Live as a SaaS offering is yet get traction in India. They have a tough battle ahead with Microsoft Online Services and Google Apps fiercely competing in this space. IBM shows very little love towards the community. They manage the influencers pretty well but do not care much for developers and IT Pros. Their developerWorks portal is an amazing resource for developers. But they can do better on the developer advocacy and evangelism front.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: Private Cloud
Type of Service: SaaS and PaaS
Key Offerings: Lotus Live and IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – High

Microsoft – Microsoft is slowly unfolding its Cloud strategy in India. This is the most crucial time for Microsoft. As they figure out how to gracefully transition from packaged software to the services world, they also need to help the ecosystem go through a smooth transition. True to its tradition, Microsoft is following a surround strategy – have the right portfolio and articulate the right story to all the entities in the ecosystem. Windows Azure Platform has just gone live and they have been enticing the developer community to get a flavor of it. They also have a strong story around the hosters through the Dynamic Data Center initiative. Windows Server Hyper-V and a suite of management tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager enable the Private Cloud for the enterprise. ISVs and startups are lured to embrace Azure through the BizSpark and related programs. Their Online Services / BPOS and Hosted CRM are targeted towards the SME segment. Microsoft is only as strong as IBM in the GSI space. All in all, I rate Microsoft as a strong contender in India within the Cloud Services segment.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: Private Cloud, Public Cloud
Type of Service: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS
Key Offerings: Online Services, Windows Azure Platform and Windows Server Hyper-V
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – High

Salesforce.com – As pioneers in the space of SaaS, Salesforce.com has high expectations from the Indian market. They started on the right note by targeting the SME market. Their competition primarily comes from Zoho and Microsoft Hosted CRM. Salesforce.com has partnered with the major SIs in India and has strong alliance teams to up-sell and customize its CRM software. Their PaaS offering in the form of force.com is yet to reach the Indian developers. I got my hands dirty on force.com. But being a hardcore developer, I found it to be limiting in many aspects. Salesforce.com has a niche and unique offering and they have a great potential in the future.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: Public Cloud
Type of Service: SaaS and PaaS
Key Offerings: Salesforce.com CRM and force.com
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – High

Oracle / SUN – I combine them at this point because they sail on the same boat. Both the companies made a lot of noise around the Cloud initially and then lost the steam. Oracle is unarguably the preferred database vendor in India for the enterprise, public sector and ISVs. But due to the lack of story around Cloud, they are losing the ground. As of now Oracle’s only Cloud offering is through AMIs on Amazon EC2. But I don’t consider that as a unique strategy from Oracle. Today every DB is available on EC2 in one form or the other. They just started to talk about Oracle as a Service (OaaS). But that’s yet to become main stream.  SUN is missing the boat due to the flux around its alliance with Oracle. Look at their Cloud pitch to get a sense of their strategy. Its just not convincing enough! Before SUN could do anything with MySQL, Amazon has gone live with its Relational Database Service (RDS) based on the same MySQL. We have to wait and watch to see where this duo is headed in the Cloud.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: None
Type of Service: None
Key Offerings: None
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – Moderate

VMware – This is the dark horse in the Cloud Computing segment. Having positioned it as a strong Virtualization platform vendor, they became the natural choice of Private Cloud for many customers in India. With its partnership with EMC, VMware is all set to conquer the Indian Private Cloud market. They have an end to end story that is very convincing to the customer. With its presence in India and strong partnership model, they are giving IBM and Microsoft a tough competition in the Datacenter Virtualization and Private Cloud space. They were quick and smart enough to re-brand themselves as the mature Private Cloud vendor. VMware vSphere is a robust and a proven Virtualization platform for the enterprise.  VMware will continue to lead the Indian Virtualization market. But their developer story is very weak. Though I personally like their vCloud API & SDK, they have a long way to go in convincing the developer community.

Summary –
Type of Cloud: Private Cloud
Type of Service: IaaS
Key Offerings: VSphere
Current India Story – Strong
Future Potential – High

This is purely based on my analysis and research of the market. If you happen to be a representative of any of the above brands and do not agree with my viewpoint, I encourage you to leave a comment. I am open to a discussion.

PS – The ‘Future Potential’ assessment is based on the type of service offering and the focus segment of the vendor in India. This assessment does not reflect the global potential.

Look Inside This Book

It Happened In India

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• A Case for Private PaaS
• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com
• Top 5 Things Microsoft Should Fix in Azure

1. Introducing Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is one of the early and also the most successful implementations of the Public Cloud. Many well known online properties leverage AWS. Amazon initially started offering a Cloud based Message Queuing service called Amazon Simple Queue Service(SQS). They eventually added services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), A CDN service called CloudFront, a flexible and distributed database service called SimpleDB. Amazon recently announced the availability of MySQL in the Cloud through a service called Relational Data Service (RDS) .

Figure 1. Amazon Web Services

Given that Amazon offers the core capabilities to run a complete web application or a Line of Business application, it is obvious that it is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). AWS is truly the platform of the platforms. You can choose an OS, App server and the programming language of your choice. AWS SDK and API is available for most of the popular languages including Java, .NET, Python and Ruby.

Figure 2. AWS API Bindings

1.1 S3

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service or S3 is a great way to store data on the Cloud that can be accessed by any application with access to the internet. S3 can store any arbitrary data as objects accompanied by metadata. These objects can be organized into buckets. Every bucket and object has a set of permissions defined in the Access Control List (ACL). The objects stored in S3 can be anything from a document, a media file, serialized objects or even Virtual Machine images. Each object can be 5GB in size while the metadata can be up to 2KB. All the objects can be accessed using simple REST or SOAP calls. This makes S3 an ideal storage solution to centrally store and retrieve data across multiple clients. S3 can also be treated as a virtual file system to provide persistence storage capabilities to applications.

Figure 3. Simple Storage Service

1.2 EC2

In simple terms, EC2 is hiring a server running at a remote location. These servers are actually Virtual Machine images running on top of Amazon’s powerful data centers. Amazon calls these virtualized server instances as Amazon Machine Images or AMI. These instances come in different sizes that you can choose from. Please refer to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance for more details on the instance types. There are many pre-configured AMIs that you can choose from. The typical workflow on EC2 is that you choose a pre-configured AMI, launch that AMI, customize it by adding additional software and by loading an app and finally, save that AMI as your custom AMI on S3. You can launch multiple instances of your AMI and attach them to an IP called the Elastic IP. Because of the dynamic capability of launching multiple instances of the same AMIs to scale up and terminating them to scale down, it is called Elastic Compute Cloud.

Figure 4. Elastic Compute Cloud

1.3 SQS

SQS is the message queue on the Cloud. It supports programmatic sending of messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the internet. Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is a popular way of ensuring that the messages are delivered once and only once. Moving that infrastructure to the web by yourself is expensive and hard to maintain. SQS gives you this capability on-demand and through the pay-by-use model. SQL is accessible through REST and SOAP based API.

Figure 5. Simple Message Queue

1.4 CloudFront

When your web application is targeting the global users, it makes sense to serve the static content through a server that is closer to the user. One of the solutions based on this principle is called Content Delivery Network (CDN). But this infrastructure of geographically spread servers to serve static content can be very expensive. CloudFront is CDN as a service. Amazon is leveraging its data center presence across the globe by serving content through these edge locations. CloudFront utilizes S3 by replicating the buckets across multiple edge servers. Amazon charges you only for the data that is served through CloudFront and there is no requirement for upfront payment.

Figure 6. CloudFront

1.5 SimpleDB

If S3 offers storage for arbitrary binary data, SimpleDB is a flexible way to store Name/Value pairs on the Cloud. This dramatically reduces the overhead of maintaining a relational database continuously. SimpleDB is accessed through REST and HTTP calls and can be easily consumed by any client that can parse a HTTP response. Many Web 2.0 applications built using AJAX, Flash and Silverlight can easily access data from SimpleDB. It is the only service from Amazon that is free up to a specific threshold.

Figure 7. SimpleDB

1.6 RDS

Amazon RDS offers relational database on the Cloud. It is based on the popular MySQL database. When you are moving a traditional Line of Business application to the Cloud and want to maintain high fidelity with the existing systems, you can choose RDS. The advantage of RDS is that you do not install, configure, manage and maintain the DB server. You only consume it and Amazon takes care of the rest. Routine operations like patching the server and backing up the databases are taken care and you only consume the service. RDS is priced on Pay-as-you-go model and there is no upfront investment required. It is accessible through the REST and SOAP based API.

Figure 8. Relational Database Service

2. Scenarios

2.1 Scalable Web Application

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur and want to go-live with your app without an upfront investment, Amazon is the place to go. By running your web app on Amazon, you can dynamically scale your application on demand and only pay for what you use. This can be the best playground for you to determine the server capacity needs and asses the peak traffic patterns before the commercial launch of your web app.

2.2 Line of Business Application

If your enterprise has to open up an internal LOB application to its employees and trading partners, it can extend the application to the Cloud by leveraging a concept of AWS called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This is achieving the Hybrid Cloud capabilities by partially moving an application to the Cloud while still running the sensitive and proprietary part of the LOB application secured behind the firewall.  VPC enables organizations to securely extend itself to the Cloud.

2.3 Data Archival

Data that is not very frequently accessed but may be required due to data retention policies can be easily archived on Amazon S3. By building a simple, searchable frontend, this data can be searched and retrieved on-demand. Moving the data to the Cloud will ensure that is available from any where and any time.

2.4 High-Performance Computing On Demand

For many enterprises, there is an occasional requirement of high performance computing. Investing in high-end servers is not an optimal solution because they may not be utilized after the task is done. With AWS, companies can virtually ‘hire’ as much computing power as they need and pay only for what they used. This will eliminate the expensive proposition of investing in the infrastructure.

2.5 Scalable Media Delivery

A TV channel might want to start delivering the recorded shows to its global audience. Since most of the content is static, they can leverage the CDN capabilities. Signing up with services like Akamai and LimeLight can be expensive. Because the media content is already stored on S3, it is very easy and cost effective to leverage Amazon’s CloudFront to deliver the media content through the geographically spread edge locations.

The objective of this article was to give you a quick overview of Amazon Web Services. I did not delve into some of the concepts like MapReduce, FPS, DevPay and the pricing details in this part. I plan to compare the pricing of various Cloud service offerings in one of the up coming articles.

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Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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