Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2" is an IaaS service providing virtual servers controllable by an API, based on the Xen hypervisor. Equivalent services include Google Compute Engine and Rack space or on-premises equivalents such as OpenStack or Eucalyptus.

To use EC2, a developer creates an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing an operating system, application programs and configuration settings. The AMI is then uploaded to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and registered with Amazon EC2, creating an AMI identifier. Once this has been done, the subscriber can requisition virtual machines on an as-needed basis.

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that you use to run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and features, such as Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances.

Direct Connect is a network service that allows a customer to establish a dedicated network connection between one of Amazon's Direct Connect locations and the customer's data center or colocation environment.

Direct Connect provides Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers with a way to transfer data that does not involve using the public Internet. According to Amazon, private network connections provide a safer, more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. Direct Connect is also useful for customers whose corporate governance prohibits the use of the public Internet for transferring sensitive data because of compliance concerns.

Direct Connect can be used with all AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon DynamoDB. AWS charges for data transferred over the dedicated connection at a reduced rate rather than the standard Internet data transfer rate (DTR), and pricing is per port-hour.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by Amazon Web Services. Content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers which cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces (REST, SOAP, and BitTorrent). Amazon launched S3 on its fifth publicly available web service, in the United States in March 2006 and in Europe in November 2007.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances. These block devices can then be used like any raw block device. In a typical use case, this would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting said filesystem. In addition EBS supports a number of advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. As of June 2014, EBS volumes can be up to 1TB in size. EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

When mounted on Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon EFS file system provides a standard file system interface and file system access semantics, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS with your existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, allowing Amazon EFS to provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.

Amazon Glacier is an online file storage web service that provides storage for data archiving and backup.

Glacier is part of the Amazon Web Services suite of cloud computing services, and is designed for long-term storage of data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval latency times of 3 to 5 hours are acceptable. Storage costs are a consistent $0.004 per gigabyte per month, which is substantially cheaper than Amazon's own Simple Storage Service (S3).

AWS Storage Gateway in an Amazon Web Services tool that connects on-premises software resources with storage in the AWS public cloud. The service securely transfers application data between on-premises software and cloud-based storage to improve application scalability and help an enterprise save costs.

AWS Storage Gateway supports gateway-cached volumes, gateway-stored volumes and gateway-virtual tape library (VTL).

Amazon Aurora is a hosted relational database service developed and offered by Amazon. Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Although it is a proprietary technology, it is based on the open-source MySQL database.

Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Complex administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database services that is offered as part of the Amazon Web Services portfolio. DynamoDB exposes a similar data model and derives its name from Dynamo, but has a different underlying implementation. Dynamo had a multi-master design requiring the client to resolve version conflicts and DynamoDB uses synchronous replication across multiple datacenters for high durability and availability.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Now you can focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale. You do not need to modify application logic, since DAX is compatible with existing DynamoDB API calls. You can enable DAX with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS SDK. Just as with DynamoDB, you only pay for the capacity you provision.

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service improves the performance of web applications by retrieving information from managed in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Memcached and Redis (also called “ElastiCache for Redis”).

As a web service running in the computing cloud, Amazon ElastiCache is designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of memcached and Redis deployments. Complex administration processes like patching software, backing up and restoring data sets and dynamically adding or removing capabilities are managed automatically. Scaling ElastiCache resources can be performed by a single API call.

Amazon Redshift is an Internet hosting service and data warehouse product which forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data-warehouse company ParAccel (later acquired by Actian), to handle large scale data sets and database migrations. Redshift differs from Amazon's other hosted database offering, Amazon RDS, in its ability to handle analytics workloads on big data sets stored by a column-oriented DBMS principle.