
Spend less for more
INGENIUM'S Cloud OfferIngenium selected
Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its strategic
cloud platform. We use AWS Services for our development and we propose it to our customers. Following there is a detailed description of the
cloud services on top of which we can build our business services for you, as described in AWS site
http://aws.amazon.com .
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
Amazon EC2 Functionality
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.
To use Amazon EC2, you simply:
- Select a pre-configured, templated image to get up and running immediately. Or create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
- Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.
- Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
- Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
- Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.
Service Highlights
Elastic - Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
Completely Controlled - You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.
Flexible - You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows Server and OpenSolaris.
Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services - Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for
computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.
Reliable - Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.
Secure - Amazon EC2 provides numerous mechanisms for securing your
compute resources.
- Amazon EC2 includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances.
- When launching Amazon EC2 resources within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can isolate your compute instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use, and connect to your existing IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. You can also choose to launch Dedicated Instances into your VPC. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.
Inexpensive - Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.
- On-Demand Instances - On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.
- Reserved Instances - Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.
- Spot Instances - Spot Instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. If you have flexibility in when your applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower your Amazon EC2 costs.
Features
Amazon EC2 provides a number of powerful features for building scalable, failure resilient, enterprise class applications, including:
- Amazon Elastic Block Store - Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes provide off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS volumes are highly available, highly reliable volumes that can be leveraged as an Amazon EC2 instance’s boot partition or attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance as a standard block device. When used as a boot partition, Amazon EC2 instances can be stopped and subsequently restarted, enabling you to only pay for the storage resources used while maintaining your instance’s state. Amazon EBS volumes offer greatly improved durability over local Amazon EC2 instance stores, as Amazon EBS volumes are automatically replicated on the backend (in a single Availability Zone). For those wanting even more durability, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of your volumes that are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and can protect your data for long term durability. You can also easily share these snapshots with co-workers and other AWS developers.
- Multiple Locations - Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries.
- Elastic IP Addresses - Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. In addition, you can optionally configure the reverse DNS record of any of your Elastic IP addresses.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud - Amazon VPC is a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources.
- Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides you with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. You can get statistics, view graphs, and set alarms for your metric data. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor. You can also supply your own business or application metric data. Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.
- Auto Scaling - Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.
- Elastic Load Balancing - Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. You can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance. Amazon CloudWatch can be used to capture a specific Elastic Load Balancer’s operational metrics, such as request count and request latency, at no additional cost beyond Elastic Load Balancing fees.
- High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters - Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances also provide significantly increased network throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations.
- VM Import- VM Import enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances. VM Import allows you to leverage your existing investments in the virtual machines that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements by seamlessly bringing those virtual machines into Amazon EC2 as ready-to-use instances. This offering is available at no additional charge beyond standard usage charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Instance Types
Standard Instances
Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.
- Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
- Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
- Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Micro Instances
Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.
- Micro Instance 613 MB of memory, up to 2 ECUs (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
High-Memory Instances
Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.
- High-Memory Extra Large Instance 17.1 GB memory, 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 420 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
- High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
- High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
High-CPU Instances
Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.
- High-CPU Medium Instance 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
- High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Cluster Compute Instances
Instances of this family provide proportionally high CPU with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications.
- Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large 23 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Cluster GPU Instances
Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.
- Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.