Amazon Elastic compute storage and database services
 

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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, and Microsoft Windows Server.

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.
• For more information on Amazon EC2 security refer to our Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Process document.

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. See Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for a more detailed description.

• 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 charge for that instance. There are three Reserved Instance types (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances) that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price. The Reserved Instance Marketplace is also available, which provides you with the opportunity to sell Reserved Instances if your needs change (i.e. want to move instances to a new AWS Region, change to a new instance type, or sell capacity for projects that end before your Reserved Instance term expires).
• 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.

Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.

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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 are network-attached, and persist 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. Amazon EBS provides two volume types: Standard volumes and Provisioned IOPS volumes. Standard volumes offer cost effective storage that is ideal for applications with moderate or bursty I/O requirements. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive applications such as databases. See Amazon Elastic Block Store for more details.

• EBS-Optimized Instances – For a low, additional, hourly fee, customers can launch selected Amazon EC2 instances types as “EBS-Optimized” instances. EBS-Optimized instances enable Amazon EC2 instances to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume. EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Mbps and 1000 Mbps depending on the instance type used. When attached to EBS-Optimized instances, Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver within 10% of their provisioned performance 99.9% of the time. See Amazon EC2 Instance Types to find out more about instance types that can be launched as EBS-Optimized instances.

• 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. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Amazon EC2 is currently available in eight regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (Sao Paulo), and AWS GovCloud.

• 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 by filling out this form.

• 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. See Amazon Virtual Private Cloud for more details.

• 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. See Amazon CloudWatch for more details.

• 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. See Auto Scaling for more details.

• 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. See Elastic Load Balancing for more details.

• 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 throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Learn more about Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances as well as other AWS services that can be used for HPC Applications.

• High I/O Instances – Customers requiring very high, low latency, random I/O access to their data can benefit from High I/O instances. High I/O instances are an Amazon EC2 instance type that can provide customers with random I/O rates over 100,000 IOPS. High I/O instances are backed by Solid State Disk (SSD) technology and are ideally suited for customers running very high performance NoSQL and relational databases. See Amazon EC2 Instance Types to find out more about High I/O instances.

• VM Import/Export – VM Import/Export enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances and export them back at any time. By importing virtual machines as ready to use EC2 instances, you can leverage your existing investments in virtual machines that meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements. You can export your previously imported EC2 instances back to your on-premise environment at any time. This offering is available at no additional charge beyond standard usage charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Learn more about VM Import/Export.

• AWS Marketplace – AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps you find, buy and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS. You can use AWS Marketplace’s 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and be charged for what you use, by the hour or month. AWS handles billing and payments, and software charges appear on your AWS bill. Learn more about AWS Marketplace.

 

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Instance Types

Standard Instances

First Generation

First generation (M1) Standard instances provide customers with a balanced set of resources and a low cost platform that is well suited for a wide variety of applications.

• M1 Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GiB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
• M1 Medium Instance 3.75 GiB of memory, 2 EC2 Compute Units (1 virtual core with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 410 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
• M1 Large Instance 7.5 GiB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
• M1 Extra Large Instance 15 GiB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform

Second Generation

Second generation (M3) Standard instances provide customers with a balanced set of resources and a higher level of processing performance compared to First Generation Standard instances. Instances in this family are ideal for applications that require higher absolute CPU and memory performance. Examples of applications that will benefit from the performance of Second Generation Standard instances include encoding, high traffic content management systems, and memcached.

• M3 Extra Large Instance 15 GiB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), EBS storage only, 64-bit platform
• M3 Double Extra Large Instance 30 GiB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), EBS storage only, 64-bit platform

Micro Instances

Micro instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to increase CPU capacity in short bursts when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that require additional compute cycles periodically. You can learn more about how you can use Micro instances and appropriate applications in the Amazon EC2 documentation.

• Micro Instance 613 MiB 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 GiB 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 GiB 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 GiB 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 GiB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
• High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GiB 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 resources with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. You can learn more about Cluster instance concepts by reading the Amazon EC2 documentation. For more information about specific use cases and cluster management options for HPC, please visit the HPC solutions page.

• Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large 23 GiB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet

• Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large 60.5 GiB memory, 88 EC2 Compute Units, 3370 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 GiB 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

High I/O Instances

Instances of this family provide very high disk I/O performance and are ideally suited for many high performance database workloads. High I/O instances provide SSD-based local instance storage, and also provide high levels of CPU, memory and network performance.

• High I/O Quadruple Extra Large 60.5 GiB memory, 35 EC2 Compute Units, 2 * 1024 GB of SSD-based 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.

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Service Highlights

Simple to Deploy – Amazon RDS makes it easy to go from project conception to deployment. Use the AWS Management Console or simple API calls to access the capabilities of a production-ready relational database in minutes without worrying about infrastructure provisioning or installing and maintaining database software.

Managed – Amazon RDS handles time-consuming database management tasks, such as backups, patch management, and replication, allowing you to pursue higher value application development or database refinements.

Compatible – With Amazon RDS, you get native access to a relational database. This facilitates compatibility with your existing tools and applications. In addition, Amazon RDS gives you optional control over which supported MySQL DB Engine Version or Oracle DB Engine Version powers your DB Instance via DB Engine Version Management.

Fast, Predictable Performance – Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is a high performance storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent performance for I/O intensive transactional database workloads. When creating a new DB Instance using the Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS storage, you can specify the IOPS your instance needs from 1,000 IOPS to 10,000 IOPS and Amazon RDS provisions that IOPS rate for the lifetime of the instance.

Scalable – You can scale the compute and storage resources available to your database to meet your application needs using the Amazon RDS API or the AWS Management Console. If you are using Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS storage with MySQL and Oracle database engines, you can scale the throughput of your database Instance by specifying the IOPS rate from 1,000 to 10,000 and corresponding storage from 100 GB to 1TB. In addition, for the MySQL database engine, you can also associate one or more Read Replicas with your database instance deployment, enabling you to scale beyond the capacity of a single database instance for read-heavy workloads. For the SQL Server database engine, you can provision from 1,000 IOPS to 7,000 IOPS with corresponding storage from 100 GB to 1TB of storage.

Reliable – Amazon RDS has multiple features that enhance reliability for critical production databases, including automated backups, DB snapshots, automatic host replacement, and Multi-AZ deployments for both MySQL and Oracle database engines. Amazon RDS runs on the same highly reliable infrastructure used by other Amazon Web Services.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon RDS is tightly integrated with other Amazon Web Services. For example, an application running in Amazon EC2 will experience low-latency database access to an Amazon RDS DB Instance in the same region.

Secure – Amazon RDS provides a number of mechanisms to secure your DB Instances.

• Amazon RDS includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to your database.
• Amazon RDS allows you to run your DB Instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Amazon VPC enables you to isolate your DB Instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use, and connect to your existing IT infrastructure through industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. Amazon RDS Micro Instances are not available in a VPC at this time. To learn more about Amazon RDS in VPC, refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Inexpensive – You pay very low rates and only for the resources you actually consume. In addition, you benefit from the option of On-Demand pricing with no up-front or long-term commitments, or even lower hourly rates via our reserved pricing option.

• On-Demand DB Instances – On-Demand DB 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.
• Reserved DB Instances – Reserved DB Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each DB Instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that DB Instance. Depending on your usage, you can choose between three Reserved DB Instance types (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization) and receive anywhere between 30% and 55% of discount over On-Demand prices. To learn more, please visit our Reserved DB Instances page.

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