FAQ for the 'Amazon Cloud' group

[RShankar]

Please post your Q&A for the 'Amazon Cloud' group here

[deniseygrace]

Question from the 'Twitter' group to the 'Amazon Cloud' group: From the several dozen services that Amazon Web Services provides, which ones (besides the ones you went over in class) are the most interesting or useful and why?

[intC0der]

Question from 'Linkedin' group to 'Amazon Cloud' group: What are the main advantages of the Amazon cloud versus the other cloud providers?

[aasthadave]

Question from Netflix to Amazon Cloud: On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest and others, knowing this, why do you believe they didnt ahve backups of such popular sites and why weren't measures taken to account for the outage?

[RShankar]

Question from Dr. Shankar to the 'Amazon Cloud' group: Amazon Cloud won a $600 M deal with CIA/DOD in 2013. Why were they chosen against other competitors?

[adrianas92]

Question from 'NOAA' to the 'Amazon Cloud' group: Are there any disadvantages with the Amazon Cloud to other providers ex: Dropbox, Microsoft, Google?

[Jnesbeth]

Question from 'GitHub' to the 'Amazon Cloud' group: Amazon cloud APIs have the functionality to be able to auto scale to control the server's needs. Is there a limit to how much date a company or person can store? If there is a limit, then how does Amazon API handles that situation when this happens?

[rnadrich]

Question from Paypal to Amazon Cloud: Since Amazon web services host and maintains websites on there servers, How does Amazon deal with websites that are involved with illegal activity (ie piracy)? If Amazon allows it or it wasn't detected by Amazon, is Amazon then responsible for these activities?

[MistyM26]

Answer from the 'Amazon Cloud' group to the 'Twitter' group:

Besides the AWS services that we discussed in our presentation, DynamoDB is a very useful service that many companies can benefit from. DynamoDB is a NoSQL, non-relational database service that offers real-time scalability. This service is very beneficial to companies who need database services with fluctuating table sizes or traffic and to companies who do not want to worry about managing hardware and software for their databases. With DynamoDB, companies only need to set up their database and then AWS can be assigned to perform all the administrative tasks of operating. AWS will automatically partition data across servers as needed to keep databases running smoothly and will replicate data across three availability zones to ensure durability. DynamoDB is also completely implemented on Solid State Drives to ensure low-latency and cost effectiveness. DynamoDB also supports many API requests such as get/put operations, as well as conditional operations and increment/decrement operations. I doesn't support some of the more complex relational queries that a standard relational database would, but many of today's database needs focus on handling large amounts of data at fluctuating levels as seen in most web-based applications like online games.

[MistyM26]

Answer from the 'Amazon Cloud' group to the 'LinkedIn' group:

AWS has several advantages over its competitors. One key advantage is the fact that AWS has been in the market a lot longer than its competitors in terms of cloud services (2006 for AWS vs. 2013 for both GCE and Azure). This means that Amazon has had more time to fine tune its services and also to develop a few dozen services from simple storage capabilities to full database management, to applications that let AWS handle operational management of their services. AWS also has several advantages when it comes to the different areas that a cloud services provider offers. When it comes to computing services, AWS has an advantage over its competitors with the number of instance families and instance types that it offers as well as regions and availability zones. AWS currently offers 5 instance families (vs 4 for GCE and 2 for Azure) and almost double the amount of instance types than its competitors. AWS and its competitors offer similar services in terms of storage but AWS has an edge with its Elastic Block Storage that can be attached and reallocated between instances as well as archiving services for data. In terms of networks, AWS also has an edge with their Route 53, DNS service and as well as their hybrid cloud. Because of its experience and client base in the field already, AWS also has more room to be flexible with prices when needed. Overall, AWS offers more services that allows customers to optimize their cloud services needs.

[MistyM26]

Answer from ‘Amazon Cloud’ group to ‘Netflix’ group:

The AWS outage that occurred on October 22, 2012 primarily affected EBS stores in a single availability zone in the US-East region and the EC2 and RDS servers that used those particular EBS stores. While Amazon stores backups of all S3 data in multiple locations (because it is a respository for data rather than a real-time virtual server), the provisioning of servers and data with EBS and EC2 servers are handled by specifications made by the client. In other words, it’s up to Amazon to ensure to the best of their ability that their services aren’t degrading and if there are any issues that those issues are fixed promptly with a plan in place to implement changes that prevents those same issues from happening again. And on the other hand, clients that use any service, whether it’s a cloud based service like AWS, or any other software for that matter, should expect failure issues at some point, and have a company plan in place on how to handle those issues so that their services are affected in the least capacity. Amazon actually makes it very easy for companies to back up their data with their multiple regions and availability zones, which were designed for customers to take advantage of, especially in cases like this.

The way Netflix handled this outage (as opposed to Reddit, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc.) is a great example of what a company should be doing to back up their own data and servers. Netflix builds all of their software to run in multiple availability zones. During this particular outage, all they had to do was to stop sending traffic to the affected availability zone and reconfigure their auto scaling , which routed all traffic to the other two available zones. With this plan in place and by using AWS’ built in functionality, Netflix reported minimal impacts to their service.

https://aws.amazon.com/message/680342/

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/10/post-mortem-of-october-222012-aws.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/07/02/cloud-computing-forecast-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-fail/

[MistyM26]

Answer from ‘Amazon Cloud’ group to Dr. Shankar:

In the bid for the $600M deal with CIA/DOD, there were initially 5 companies who offered proposals. Of these 5 initial proposals, the CIA was strongly considering two companies: Amazon and IBM. The proposals of each of these companies were evaluated on technical and management aspects, past performances, security, prices, and overall risk. According to data released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Amazon evaluated higher in all categories except Management Approach, and was determined to be an overall low risk investment while an investment in IBM was thought to be high risk.

The major determining factors within these categories was Amazon’s experience at being a cloud services provider (2006 for Amazon vs. 2011 for IBM), and the fact that CIA was much more confident in Amazon’s ability to auto-scale all applications. The CIA was very concerned that IBM could not provide auto-scaling for all applications even though it promised that it would have this ability implemented because IBM currently did not have provisions for this type of auto-scaling in its current cloud services. According to the GAO, even though IBM offered the same services at a lower price than AWS, the CIA was more confident in AWS’ “superior technical solution,” meaning they would rather pay more for AWS’ service than risk IBM not being able to provide the services needed.

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/amazon-wins-best-cloud-in-cia-bake-off/d/d-id/1110504?itc=edit_in_body_cross

http://fcw.com/articles/2013/06/14/cia-cloud-contract-gao.aspx

http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655241.pdf

[Magicperf]

Answer from Amazon-Cloud to NOAA: Short answer is YES. The difference is that Microsoft Azure offers a better guarantee that will be up 99% of the time, Google Cloud will offer you better prices. Dropbox is only a Cloud Drive platform, you cannot host a website nor start a Virtual Machine instance nor run a database online. It is just storage. So, in this case, Amazon Cloud offers much more functionality than Dropbox.

[Magicperf]

Answer from Amazon-Cloud to Paypal: Before having amazon maintain a website, a domain name must be registered through another service (such as GoDaddy or HostGator). After having a domain name, the user can have Amazon to host that domain. The user owns the domain name and its content. From the Terms and Conditions, Amazon can check the content freely. If the content is not appropriate to what was agreed in the Terms and Conditions, Amazon can cancel connectivity to your site and the user's account. The user stills owns the domain and can transfer it somewhere else It is up to Amazon if the user/domain can come back to them, depending on the degree of fault.

[Magicperf]

Answer from Amazon-Cloud to GitHub: Yes. There is a limit per user/company. the way API handles is that lets you increase the space from the AWS console. If the space is not increased, most resources/functions of the application hosted on Amazon (EC2 instance or Web Service) will not work. More detailed information found in the following links:

http://alestic.com/2009/06/ec2-user-data-scripts http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-resource-limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html

[jsimonis]

Question from Amazon-Retail to Amazon Cloud:

Since Amazon cloud services seems to be the go to vendor for large companies(nexflix, comcast, etc). In what way can small businesses benefit from using Amazon as their cloud service provider?