Cloud Overview

Architecture, Performance,
Support
 Architecture of the EC2
• Many operating systems on one
machine

• Systems that constantly measure

performance (hypervisors)

• Amazon Devpay: It’s easy to charge

3rd parties for the use of your
services in the cloud.
 Architecture of EC2
• consolidation
• rapid provisioning
• dynamic fault tolerance against
software failures through rapid
reboots
• hardware fault tolerance through
migration of a virtual machine to
different hardware
 Architecture of EC2
• Disadvantages:
• No physical access to the machine
• Can meet HIPAA security standards
but requires more work than physical
boxes
 Performance
• Can achieve greater levels of
performance not possible for physical
boxes.
• E.G. It’s possible to deploy a
virtualized single CPU 5ghz
machine… even though 5ghz chips
do not as of yet exist
• In every day use, performance is
comparable to physical boxes. A
 Performance
• Caveat: Writing to EBS is a bit slower
than writing to SSDs with an IO of
800mb/s but EBS is safer than disk
because of redundancy.

• How safe is EBS? 0.1% - 0.5% failure

rate of a volume whereas commercial
physical disk fails at a rate of 4%
 Support
• Forums
• Silver – 10% of your AWS bill
• Gold – 20% of your AWS bill
 Forums
• Support in Forums is user generated
• User generated advice can be wrong
 Silver
• Support During Business Hours (6am
– 6pm PDT)
• Ticketed Support
 Gold
• Everything that silver offers plus:
• 24x7 Support
• Phone support