Amazon Web Services

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Amazon Web Services, Inc.

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 2006
Seat Seattle United StatesUnited States
management Andrew R. Jassy ( CEO )
sales $ 25.7 billion (2018)
Branch Cloud computing
Website aws.amazon.com/de
As of February 2, 2019

Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) is an American cloud computing provider, which is in 2006 as a subsidiary of online - online retailer Amazon.com was founded. Numerous popular services such as Dropbox , Netflix , Foursquare or Reddit use the services of Amazon Web Services. In 2017, Gartner rated AWS as a leading international provider in cloud computing .

history

AWS was launched in 2006 to provide developers with an on-demand IT infrastructure; From the beginning, the focus was primarily on companies and less on end users . For the operation of its e-commerce platform itself, the company needed globally distributed data centers and high-availability services as well as interfaces to other applications that were to be made available to third parties with Amazon Web Services. However, Amazon did not take this step in order to better utilize its capacities. The first AWS virtual server service was designed at a company's location in South Africa .

Amazon Web Services are sometimes offered free of charge. In November 2010, a program called Free Usage Tier was launched, which includes a limited amount of computing power (750 hours) and other popular AWS services. After the first year, customers must switch to a commercial plan and pay normal fees. The introduction of a free tier was generally seen as a reaction to OpenStack , which is being pushed in particular by the competing company Rackspace .

In May 2013, Amazon announced that it would also develop Amazon Web Services in Germany in the future. [obsolete] After corresponding centers had previously also been founded in other regions, new services for AWS should be designed from mid-2013 at the locations in Berlin and Dresden . The group operates three data centers in Frankfurt am Main .

Components

server

The EC2 ( Elastic Compute Cloud ) are virtual servers that run either with a Linux distribution or Microsoft Windows Server . They do not have a fixed contract term and are billed by the hour or even by the second. There are several tariffs to choose from, which differ based on the available RAM and the compute units that correspond to virtual processors . Compared to other providers, virtual machine instances are not persistent . This means that the content of the main memory is deleted when the instance is stopped.

Storage

S3 ( Simple Storage Service ) is a file hosting service that can theoretically store any large amount of data and is billed according to consumption. Access is via HTTP / HTTPS . Amazon first introduced the concept of buckets and objects , which is similar to directories and files and has established itself as a standard that other providers are also imitating. Amazon also offers network drives with Elastic File System and file archiving with Glacier . Amazon promises a "99.999999999" percent durability of the data.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances.

To facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data, AWS provides rentable hard drive storage with the Snowball service, onto which large amounts of data can be copied and sent back by parcel service. The physical transfer of very large amounts of data (a few hundred terabytes to petabytes) to the cloud is much faster.

network

CloudFront is a content delivery network that can provide content from other AWS services such as EC2 or S3 in a globally distributed manner in order to reduce access time. The service is limited to the HTTP (S) protocol and is charged according to the gigabytes accessed depending on the respective region. Depending on the configuration, individual files or entire domains can be provided via CloudFront, optionally also encrypted via SSL . In addition, Amazon operates a domain name service under the name Route 53 , which enables the mutual translation of IP addresses and domains. Billing is graded according to the zones used .

Database

Either SimpleDB or Relational Database Service (RDS for short) can be used as a virtual database . The former is intended for storing simple - that is, non-relational - information that can be structured in the form of objects and properties. SimpleDB is still in beta testing, according to Amazon , while RDS is officially supported. The Relational Database Service includes a virtual database based on either MySQL , Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle . While SimpleDB is only billed according to the memory used, the tariffs of Amazon RDS are made up of memory and computing power of the selected instance.

development

With Elastic Beanstalk Amazon offers a PaaS for Java , Python , Docker and other platforms. In addition, the Simple Workflow Service (SWS), Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Simple Notification Service (SNS) provide further services for developers. The latter is suitable, for example, for sending notifications about certain events of other AWS services via email or SMS . Applications can also be made available on Amazon Web Services in the so-called AWS Marketplace , where they can be booked by third parties.

directory

AWS Identity and Access Management ( called IAM ) is a directory service used to manage users and resources in an organization. Without Amazon IAM, logging in to any AWS services is limited to the personal Amazon account, which grants administrative rights and may pose a security risk in productive use. With the help of Identity and Access Management, users can be created, grouped together and their access to almost all AWS services such as EC2 or S3 can be regulated.

administration

In recent years, Amazon has developed numerous web services that are used to manage the core offering. For example, in May 2009, Amazon CloudWatch introduced the option of monitoring virtual servers on EC2 and, if necessary, automatically adjusting the selected tariff and its resources based on the load ( scalability ). Since the beginning of 2012, a dedicated network connection to Amazon Web Services can be established with Amazon Direct Connect , which is implemented via third web hosts and is intended to facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data and improve IT security and data protection .

Others

While all other services are based on technical services, Amazon Mechanical Turk (after the English name of the Chess Turk ) is an exception: Orders can be posted there that can be broken down into small tasks and processed by humans. This includes, for example, simple searches on the World Wide Web or the correction of spelling errors in individual sentences. Mechanical Turk is also often used to recognize objects in images (such as humans or animals) . The service is still in beta testing .

privacy

Due to the fact that Amazon is a US company, Amazon Web Services, like comparable services, has been criticized in Germany for years in terms of data protection . To compensate for the problem, Amazon offers so-called regions , which in turn are divided into Availability Zones and correspond to physical locations for the storage of data. For example, the regions Ireland (eu-west-1) and Frankfurt am Main (eu-central-1) can be selected for Amazon EC2 , so that instances are only executed there. Since 2007, regions outside the United States have also been available for Amazon S3. In order to improve data protection, Amazon also explicitly gives developers the option of encrypting data stored on AWS again themselves - even when using an official software development kit . Large companies are allowed to use hardware encryption with individual components.

criticism

Serious security gaps in Amazon Web Services have repeatedly been discovered, which is why the platform is being viewed critically by experts. In 2013 it was also announced that Amazon had received a major order from the CIA and would operate their public cloud , which raised further doubts about the data protection of the offer. With AWS, Amazon prevailed over IBM and other applicants in the award .

In December 2010, Amazon Web Services was briefly used by WikiLeaks to reduce the load on their own servers . They came under pressure due to the publication of diplomatic dispatches and at times could no longer deliver the content at all. Shortly after the customer relationship became known, Amazon blocked access to WikiLeaks because, according to an official statement by the company, "illegal material" was made available there. Observers assumed that political pressure was the main reason, particularly from Senator Joe Lieberman . Amazon's decision was publicly controversial and received wide media attention.

Amazon states that it uses standard industry procedures to protect its data centers , especially against power outages . However, the company has come under fire because serious problems still arise. For example, a lightning strike in August 2011 caused services in the Irish data center to become unavailable and numerous other online services to fail. The case attracted widespread attention because it affected Microsoft as well as Amazon. A similar error occurred in July 2012, which was caught by the emergency power supply , but which in turn also had a technical malfunction a little later. After the triple failure, Amazon was accused of insufficient testing of its systems. Most recently, a failure in August 2013 disrupted Vine and Instagram, among others .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on AWS. Amazon Web Services, Inc., accessed on March 19, 2017 (German).
  2. ↑ Amazon.com, Inc .: Amazon - Investor Relations - Officers & Directors. Amazon.com, Inc., accessed March 18, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Amazon.com, Inc .: Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $ 72.4 Billion. Amazon.com, Inc., January 31, 2019, accessed February 2, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Helene Laube: Battle for the Cloud: This is how the tech giants struggle. In: handelszeitung .ch. December 1, 2018, accessed December 1, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Katrin Hofmann: Amazon is increasingly targeting companies with Amazon Web Services. In: IT Business. August 1, 2011, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Philipp Strube: Amazon's Web Services at a Glance: The Cloud Computing Universe. In: t3n magazine. March 4, 2010, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  7. ↑ How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business? Rumor has it that they wanted to 'lease' out their excess capacity outside of the holiday season (November – January). Is that true? - Updated - Quora. Retrieved November 30, 2017 .
  8. ^ Jack Clark: How Amazon exposed its guts: The History of AWS's EC2. In: ZDNet. June 7, 2012, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  9. ↑ Falk Hedemann: Amazon AWS: One year Amazon Cloud Hosting from November 1st. free of charge! (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. October 22, 2010, archived from the original on August 28, 2013 ; Retrieved August 26, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / t3n.de
  10. ↑ Jens Ihlenfeld: Amazon founds cloud development center in Germany. In: Golem. May 2, 2013, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  11. ^ Third AZ in EU (Frankfurt) region. Amazon, accessed September 24, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Pricing for Amazon EC2 - AWS. Retrieved December 5, 2017 (German).
  13. ↑ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  14. ↑ a b Amazon Simple Storage Service. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  15. ↑ AWS | Amazon Elastic Block Store EBS - Incremental Backup. Retrieved October 18, 2019 (German).
  16. ↑ AWS Snowball | Physical migration of petabyte records | Amazon Web Services. Retrieved on February 11, 2020 (German).
  17. ↑ Amazon CloudFront. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  18. ↑ Amazon Route 53. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  19. ↑ Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  20. ↑ Amazon Relational Database Service. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  21. ↑ Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  22. ↑ Amazon Simple Notification Service. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  23. ↑ Amazon AWS Marketplace. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  24. ↑ Amazon AWS Identity and Access Management. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  25. ↑ Falk Hedemann: Cloud Computing: Amazon EC2 Web Services with important new functions. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. May 18, 2009, archived from the original on April 20, 2012 ; Retrieved August 29, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / t3n.de
  26. ↑ Christian Kirsch: Dedicated network connection for Amazon's cloud. In: iX. Heise Verlag, January 11, 2012, accessed on August 29, 2013 .
  27. ↑ Amazon Mechanical Turk. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  28. ↑ Harald Weiss, Kathrin Schmitt: More acceptance, more users - fewer problems. In: CHIP Online. February 13, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2013 .
  29. ^ Regions and Availability Zones. In: AWS Documentation. Amazon, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  30. ↑ Jan Christe: Amazon S3 now also stores in Europe. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. November 6, 2007, archived from the original on July 7, 2014 ; Retrieved August 29, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / t3n.de
  31. ↑ Jochen Weber: Cloud services for startups: “Automation is a must”. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. August 26, 2013, archived from the original on August 29, 2013 ; Retrieved August 29, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / t3n.de
  32. ↑ Tobias Wendehost: Security gaps discovered in the Amazon cloud. In: Computerwoche. October 24, 2011, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  33. ↑ Varinia Bernau: More cheerful than cloudy. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. July 23, 2013, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  34. ^ Bernard Golden: What the CIA Private Cloud Really Says About Amazon Web Services. In: CIO. August 6, 2013, accessed August 31, 2013 .
  35. ↑ Falk Hedemann: Amazon bans WikiLeaks from its servers. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. December 2, 2010, archived from the original on May 30, 2014 ; Retrieved August 26, 2013 .
  36. ↑ Boycott: Amazon bans WikiLeaks from servers. In: Spiegel Online. December 1, 2010, accessed August 26, 2013 .
  37. ↑ Dieter Petereit: Lightning strike in Dublin: Amazon and Microsoft offline. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. August 8, 2011, archived from the original on April 16, 2014 ; Retrieved August 29, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / t3n.de
  38. ↑ Achim Sawall: Triple power failure caused time out. In: Golem. June 19, 2012, accessed August 29, 2013 .
  39. ↑ Florian Kalenda: Amazon failure over the weekend disturbed Vine and Instagram. In: ZDNet. August 26, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2013 .