Getting Started with Amazon EC2

David J. Malan
malan@post.harvard.edu
www.cs50.net
Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!
ƒ “The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from
1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images
scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles
are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article
takes quite a bit of work — each article is actually composed of numerous
smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent
fashion. . . . I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used
only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article
PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more
machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours
using 100 EC2 instances . . . . (In fact, it work so well that we ran it twice, since
after we were done we noticed an error in the PDFs.)”

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Virtualization

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/server-virtualization1.htm
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Virtualization
ƒ Xen
ƒ VMware
ƒ Workstation, Fusion, Server, ESXi, vSphere
ƒ Parallels
ƒ Workstation, Server for Mac, Virtuozzo
ƒ Microsoft
ƒ Hyper-V, Virtual PC
ƒ Sun
ƒ VirtualBox
ƒ QEMU
ƒ FreeVPS
ƒ Virtual Iron
ƒ ...
3
Virtualization
ƒ Full Virtualization
ƒ Paravirtualization
ƒ OS-Level Virtualization

4
Xen

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/topic/eicaz/eicaz516.gif
5
Virtual Private Servers (VPSes)
ƒ Linode
ƒ ServInt
ƒ TekTonic
ƒ VPSLAND
ƒ ...

http://www.servint.net/supervps.php
6
Managed Colocation
ƒ Rackspace
ƒ ...

http://www.rackspace.com/solutions/managed_hosting/configurations/index.php
7
Clouds
ƒ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
ƒ Google App Engine
ƒ Microsoft Azure Services Platform
ƒ ...

8
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
ƒ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
ƒ Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
ƒ Amazon SimpleDB
ƒ Amazon CloudFront
ƒ Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
ƒ Amazon Elastic MapReduce

9
cloud.cs50.net

10
Jargon
ƒ AMI
ƒ Instance
ƒ EBS Volume
ƒ ...

11
AMIs
ƒ Debian
ƒ Fedora
ƒ Gentoo Linux
ƒ Red Hat Enterprise Linux
ƒ OpenSolaris
ƒ openSUSE Linux
ƒ Oracle Enterprise Linux
ƒ Ubuntu Linux
ƒ Windows Server 2003
ƒ ...

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Standard Instances
ƒ Small Instance (m1.small)
ƒ 1.7 GB memory
ƒ 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
ƒ 160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
ƒ 32-bit platform
ƒ Large Instance (m1.large)
ƒ 7.5 GB memory
ƒ 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
ƒ 850 GB instance storage (2×420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
ƒ 64-bit platform
ƒ Extra Large Instance (m1.xlarge)
ƒ 15 GB memory
ƒ 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
ƒ 1,690 GB instance storage (4×420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
ƒ 64-bit platform

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High-CPU Instances
ƒ High-CPU Medium Instance (c1.medium)
ƒ 1.7 GB of memory
ƒ 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
ƒ 350 GB of instance storage
ƒ 32-bit platform
ƒ High-CPU Extra Large Instance (c1.xlarge)
ƒ 7 GB of memory
ƒ 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
ƒ 1690 GB of instance storage
ƒ 64-bit platform

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Regions + Availability Zones
ƒ United States
ƒ us-east-1a
ƒ us-east-1b
ƒ us-east-1c
ƒ Europe
ƒ eu-west-1a
ƒ eu-west-1b

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On-Demand Instances

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
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Reserved Instances

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
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Data Transfer

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
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Data Transfer
ƒ Availability Zone Data Transfer
ƒ $0.00 per GB
ƒ Regional Data Transfer
ƒ $0.01 per GB in/out
ƒ Public and Elastic IP Data Transfer
ƒ $0.01 per GB in/out
ƒ Elastic IP Addresses
ƒ No cost while in use
ƒ $0.01 per non-attached Elastic IP address per complete hour
ƒ $0.00 per Elastic IP address remap – first 100 remaps / month
ƒ $0.10 per Elastic IP address remap – additional remap / month over 100

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EBS Volumes + Snapshots

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
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Elastic IP Addresses
ƒ No cost while in use
ƒ $0.01 per non-attached Elastic IP address per complete hour
ƒ $0.00 per Elastic IP address remap – first 100 remaps / month
ƒ $0.10 per Elastic IP address remap – additional remap / month over 100

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Cost Less than $15 per Student

22
AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

23
Concerns
ƒ Time
ƒ No _______
ƒ PEBKAC
ƒ “cloud is laggy”
ƒ “Cloud is wicked laggy”
ƒ Bandwidth Costs
ƒ “Lightning Strike Triggers Amazon EC2 Outage”

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CS 50 in a Box

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Resources
ƒ Getting Started Guide
ƒ http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/
ƒ User Guide
ƒ http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/
ƒ Developer Guide
ƒ http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/DeveloperGuide/
ƒ ...

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AWS in Education
http://aws.amazon.com/education/

ƒ Educators
ƒ Researchers
ƒ Students
ƒ Education IT

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What’s Next?
ƒ Q&A
ƒ Getting Your Hands Dirty
ƒ Getting Your Hands Dirtier

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Getting Started with Amazon EC2

David J. Malan
malan@post.harvard.edu