Amazon Web Services Management

Summary of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services provide you with the ability to create virtual servers and only pay for them while they are in use. The virtual servers (known as Instances) can be various sizes in terms of CPU, RAM and temporary disk space. Disk space is temporary, once you stop an Instance, you lose all data stored on that Instance. For permanent storage, Elastic Block Store (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3) or Simple DB are the solutions.

Instances refer to the virtual resources of the virtual server. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) refer to the Operating System running on your Instance. You can select from prebuilt AMIs providing Linux, Windows and Solaris Operating Systems. Many AMIs are supplied with preinstalled software such as Apache/PHP/MySQL. You can also build your own AMIs and save them for provisioning later.

For permanent storage EBS, S3 or SDB are the solutions. These can be attached to Instances and used with your software.

All services are pay as you go. You pay for the Instance in use by the hour, external bandwidth to and from the Instance (per GB) and the EBS, S3 or SDB storage (per GB).

Contact Steve Nice on 0845 4210440 to discuss how ForLinux can help you deploy your AWS solution.

When implementing a solution with AWS here are just a few question you may want to consider -

Servers:

  • What sizes are available?
  • What if I need to expand?
  • What distributions are available?
  • Can I build my own images?
  • Who owns the images?
  • What about Microsoft licenses?
  • How do servers communicate?
  • Do I incur bandwidth charges for internal communication?

Storage:

  • Which storage is best – S3 or EBS?
  • Can data be recovered?
  • Can data be backed up?
  • What is the cost difference?
  • Where is my data physically located?
  • What is the speed of access?
  • Can I lose my data?
  • Is it scalable?
  • How do I import data?

Security:

  • Are the servers secure?
  • Who has physical access?
  • Where are the servers?
  • If I lose the keypair can I login?

Applications:

  • What applications can I run?
  • What is the difference between SDB and MySQL?
  • How easy is it to migrate?

Scaling and Load balancing:

  • How easy is it up scale up the hardware?
  • What load balancing is available?

Costs:

  • What are the overall costs?
  • How can I control costs?

ForLinux can help you answer these questions and provide a management service for your AWS deployments. ForLinux can also provide support for the Linux servers. In terms of support, there is very little difference between a Linux server running on AWS as there is on a physical server (once it is set up).

Contact Steve Nice on 0845 4210440 to discuss how ForLinux can help you deploy your AWS solution.

What can ForLinux do with AWS

Build a custom AMI

AMIs are prebuilt Operating Systems such as Fedora, CentOS etc. However, these AMI are standard builds and contain software which you may not need. Also, if you have a standard set of software which you always install (Imagemagick, Joomla etc) then you can build the image and save it for deployment later (automatically if required).

Create Instances with storage

When you create an Instance you have to decide which storage is best. You will also need to take into account the security grouping, firewall and key pairs. ForLinux can help you decide and create the Instance accordingly.

Control Costs

There are many cost options for AWS. The main ones being Instance size, storage, bandwidth,location, IP addresses and load balancing. Knowing what these are and keeping them under control can be a challenge.

Once you have selected your Instance, storage and additional items, ForLinux will be able to tell you exactly how much you will be spending per hour. In addition, ForLinux can keep you informed of how much you have currently spent.

Simplify management

ForLinux will take the hassle out of creating, suspending and terminating your Instances, allocating storage, managing data and security.

ForLinux can also manage your Linux server and the Open Source software running on the server.

Consultancy

ForLinux can examine you existing infrastructure and application to see how it would fit into AWS.

Contact Steve Nice on 0845 4210440 to discuss how ForLinux can help you deploy your AWS solution.

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