I just spent about a day and half working with various Amazon Cloud Computing products to investigate the possibility of moving Agtek's server offerings out of our facility and into Amazon's Cloud. As it's the day before Thanksgiving I thought I'd document all my findings so that when I come back to work next week there will be a record.

Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure is organized into a range of very specific products. The products are all designed to work together as building blocks for a complete solution. The products I investigated were:

1. Amazon EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud
2. Amazon RDS - Relational Database Service
3. Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store
4. Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service

Amazon's EC2 service allows customers to dynamically create and deploy Linux or Window servers. You pay an hourly rate based on the performance of the server. A basic server with 1.7gb of memory and an approx. 1.5ghz equivalent processor runs $0.085/hour. Prices climb quickly as you require higher performance machines. You can select from a huge variety of server configurations. You can also modify the configuration, create a bootable image from it, store the image in S3 and directly boot from that. For example, I started with the most basic Fedora 8 configuration they had and installed Sun's Java 1.6 distribution (required by the Agtek Access Server). I created an Amazon AMI image directly from the machine and stored it to our S3 account. I can now use that image anytime I want to launch a new server. There is local storage associated with the running server but it is NOT persistent. To store persisted data your application must use either S3 or EBS.

Amazon's RDS service is similar to EC2 except that it is completely focused on providing MySQL 5.1 compliant servers. You pay an hourly rate which is slightly higher but similar to the EC2 rate to run a fully configured and managed MySQL 5.1 server. Additionally you pay a monthly fee for the database storage associated with the server. Included in the cost is a nightly backup with single day retention. Multiple day retention is available but may cost extra (depends on storage requirements). For my tests I used a basic machine with 5gb of persistent storage.

Amazon's EBS service allows customers to buy the equivalent of a raided disk system and attach it to a running EC2 server. Disk sizes range from 5gb to 1tb. They claim that reliability is 10 times that of a standard raid disk system but the details are a bit sketchy. If additional reliability is required the EBS can be backed up to your S3 account. The advantage of EBS over S3 is that EBS can be formatted to act just like a local hard disk. I did not test this product as I didn't need persistent storage for the tests.

Amazon's S3 service is the backbone of the whole system. S3 provides long term, fully reliable data storage. All the other products fall back on S3 for reliable storage. For example, if you create your own AMI image to boot an EC2 server Amazon requires that the image is stored in S3. All the RDS and EBS data backups are done to S3. We are currently using S3 for backing up various Agtek machines.