Amazon Web Services battles

for cloud computing supremacy

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Cloud computing is everywhere in business. Whether a small van-hire business in Burnley needs a few extra servers to power its website or a multinational wants a large data warehouse to analyse millions of customer transactions.

The spread of the cloud – large networks of web servers and datacentres that are hosted online rather than on users’ own computers – is in no small part down to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In just seven years, Amazon Web Services, the services arm of US online retailer Amazon, has become one of the biggest suppliers of cloud computing. It has hundreds of thousands of customers, including Netflix and Instagram, and the Central Intelligence Agency and Unilever.

Growth has been rapid. AWS’s revenue was estimated at about $1.5bn in 2012, according to a report by Baird Equity Research.

AWS refuses to say how many people it employs or what its sales figures are – parent company Amazon does not reveal this information – but according to Baird research, as of year-end 2010, Amazon employed 33,700 full-time and part-time employees.

The company’s persistent innovation has impressed analysts. And as more businesses see computing power as a commodity to be purchased when needed, like water or electricity, AWS is well placed for future growth. There may turbulence ahead, though.

AWS has seen increased competition from cloud infrastructure companies like Rackspace, as well as established software companies such as Microsoft and Google, and also IBM and Fujitsu.

AWS vies for domination within cloud marketNick Huber investigates whether or not Amazon Web Services can sustain its growth in the cloud computing market, despite increasing competition from rivals such as Microsoft and Google

AWS’s main cloud servicesThere are six types of service, summarised below by Baird research.

1. Networking services Amazon allows companies to extend their infrastructure into the cloud via Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which connects a network to AWS with a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud, and launch resources in a virtual network; AWS Direct Connect, a private, dedicated connection to Amazon data centres; and Amazon Route 53, a domain name service.

2. Compute servicesEC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) pay-as-you-go computing capacity in the cloud, with a range of CPU, memory and local disk options.

3. Storage servicesS3 (Simple Storage Service) offers space for storing and retrieving anyamount of data from anywhere on the web; AWS Storage Gateway is for seamless backup of enterprise data; Amazon Glacier offers low-cost data archiving.

4. Database servicesAmazon RDS means there is no need to install or manage database instances. Includes managed MySQL and Microsoft SQL servers.

5. App servicesElastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data; ElastiCache, is a managed cached service.

6. Deployment and administrationSoftware to help IT staff manage AWS service. Products include CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk.

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Source: Forrester

Cloud service providersMost popular cloud services

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In November 2012, AWS said it would cut prices for its storage service S3 by 25%. Amazon and Google have also lowered prices for infrastructure services. If the suppliers start a price war, AWS’s profit margins will be squeezed, which could make it harder to maintain its impressive growth.

Other challenges include keeping up with growing demand, which may require it to build more datacentres, and concerns about the security of cloud computing.

Bright forecast

Analysts predict the market for cloud services will grow rapidly over the next 10 years. AWS and Google are leading the market.

AWS is “making waves” in IT by “applying retail economics”, which is making it an “emerging IT mega-vendor”, Morgan Stanley said in a report published in May 2013.

AWS revenue could be $24bn (£15.7bn) by 2022, through a combination of services that produce greater scale in computing tasks, and by offering “a continual downward pressure in pricing”, the investment bank said.

The public cloud market is still relatively small but growing fast. The top 10 public cloud companies grew by 37% collectively, compared with just 2% for traditional technology companies, according to research company Baird.

Some experts believe AWS can replace expensive corporate technology investments, including computing power, storage, databases, messaging and other building blocks, to run business applications.

One of AWS’s most eye-catching contracts was to provide computer services to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via a private cloud developed in the organisation’s datacentre. The deal, news of which emerged in March 2013, was described by Wired magazine as “seismic” shift in cloud computing.

AWS grew out of Amazon’s core retail (e-commerce) business, whichhas operated at a massive scale for more than a decade, and requires its own

Timeline of key eventsMarch 2006AWS launches Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). July 2006AWS launches Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). August 2006AWS launches Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) November 2007AWS launches European Region enabling developers and businesses to store their data in Europe. August 2008AWS launches Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). November 2008AWS launches Amazon CloudFront. December 2008AWS launches Public Data Sets on AWS. Amazon EC2 launches in EU West region. January 2009AWS launches the AWS Management Console.

April 2009AWS launches Amazon Elastic MapReduce. May 2009AWS launches AWS Import/Export. October 2009AWS launches Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). December 2009AWS launches Northern California Region in the US. December 2009AWS launches Amazon EC2 Spot instances and an additional pricing option for customers. Also launches Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

Source: Amazon, Morgan Stanley Research, company data and IDC

Amazon Web Services growth projection

Morgan Stanley projects AWS will grow from a $2bn business in 2012 to +$24bn in 10 years

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powerful, flexible and centralised technology infrastructure. Amazon engineers created a platform for third-party online sellers. The platform became AWS.

Pay as you go

One attraction of cloud computing for businesses is that they don’t have to pay for expensive technology (computing power, storage, databases) up front to run business applications. Instead, they can pay for computing power when needed – just as businesses only pay for the electricity they use.

AWS’s sales pitch has been used by outsourcing suppliers for decades. Why spend most of your IT budget and staff time on IT chores – for example, running servers and checking that you have sufficient storage – which is not your main business and is unlikely to boost growth or give you an edge over rivals?

Some analysts believe web services, including AWS, will increasingly underpin the IT industry, replacing the old model whereby companies own or rent their own IT kit and software, which is stored on their premises.

Main services

AWS’s best-known services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which lets customers buy computing power via web-based servers, and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which it says lets customers store and retrieve “any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web”.AWS offers lots of other cloud services (more than 40), including high-speed computing and big data services.

AWS provides services from datacentres in different locations (availability zones) that are designed to be as resilient as possible. In some places, it has reserve datacentres to ensure services can carry on if the main datacentre fails.

The company has had a few big and widely reported data outages, of course. However, analysts say the glitches have not damaged the company’s reputation.

AWS is strongest in “infrastructure services”, whereby virtual servers are rented from AWS for different amounts of time. Customers rent virtualised storage – paying for what they use. Contracts are flexible, and can be short or long.

 April 2010AWS launches Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)AWS launches Amazon RDS in EU Region. AWS launches Asia-Pacific Region in Singapore. July 2010AWS introduces cluster compute instances, an Amazon EC2 instance type tailored for high-performance computing. September 2010AWS launches AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Oracle certifies enterprise software on Amazon EC2.  May 2011SAP certified SAP Rapid Deployment. Solutions and SAP BusinessObjects to run in production on AWS. August 2011AWS launches AWS Direct Connect.AWS launches AWS GovCloud, a region designed to allow US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.AWS launches Amazon ElastiCache. December 2011AWS launches South America (Sao Paulo) Region. January 2012AWS launches Amazon DynamoDB.AWS launches AWS Storage Gateway. February 2012AWS launches Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF). February 2013AWS launches Amazon Redshift.AWS launches AWS OpsWorks. March 2013AWS launches AWS CloudHSM.

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AWS usage continues to rise(billions of objects stored)

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“We’ve saved tens of millions of dollars in the small initiatives that we’ve done”Michael Harte, CIO, Commonwealth Bank

AWS is widely used for is for testing software. Organisations developing their own software will try it out using AWS systems “renting sometimes large amounts of server capacity for a short amount of time and shut it all down after the test is over”.

The testing service is quick and easy to use, says David Bradshaw, research manager for software and services in Europe at research company IDC. “The customer doesn’t want to wait months for servers which they might not want.”

Big savings?

Size matters in the cloud. Amazon Web Services says it can keep charges low because it builds and manages infrastructure “at a massive scale”. It claims to have lowered prices over 30 times since 2007.

According to Amazon, every day AWS adds the equivalent server capacity to power Amazon as when it was just a $5.2bn business.

AWS says its customers have made significant savings. “We’ve already saved tens of millions of dollars in the small initiatives that we’ve done,” Michael Harte, CIO at Commonwealth Bank, is quoted as saying on AWS’s website. “And we’re looking forward to saving hundreds of millions of dollars buying specified services on demand.”

It is hard to find independent research to verify these claims, though. Research from IDC, which was sponsored by AWS and interviewed 11 organisations running applications on AWS, found that the average return on investment over five years was 626%. Average payback time on AWS services was seven months. The average saving per application was just over $500,000 (£325,000).

Much of these savings came from moving applications onto AWS infrastructure, which has lower capital and operational costs.

Source: Morgan Stanley Research, Microsoft and Amazon

AWS enables better economics from scale and automated elasticity

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There is also evidence that AWS can help IT departments get more done. IT staff productivity among the AWS customers surveyed increased by 52%, IDC found.

But saving money and increasing efficiency by using AWS may not be straightforward. As Morgan Stanley notes, the savings you can make depend on a range of factors, including the size of the organisation, the type of application it is using and whether fewer employees are needed to manage the AWS technology.

Complex charging

To make the most of AWS technology, however, IT departments need to understand its pricing.

AWS charges customers in three main ways: pay-per-use, reserved instances, and spot Instances.

An “instance” is a virtual machine or virtual server. Instead of buying a server to sit in your office, you purchase an instance – a virtual version that sits on the AWS cloud. The customer runs the machine.

A reserved instance is like saying, “I need a server for three years and I need it to have X CPU power, Y memory.” You choose the instance type (the type of server you need based on your required specifications) and make a small upfront payment, typically around $250.

The payment reserves the server for you for three years. You pay $0.012 per hour when you use the server.

Spot instances are when customers can bid in an auction on unused AWS cloud capacity.

If demand for cloud services is low, there may be surplus computing capacity, meaning that the “spot price” is low. Conversely, when a lot of people are using a lot of cloud computing, the spot price increases.

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Fast-evolving AWS services

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Main global executivesAndy Jassy, senior vice-president, Amazon Web Services and Amazon InfrastructureLeads the Amazon Web Services (AWS) business and the Technology Infrastructure organisation for Amazon.com.  A member of Amazon.com’s senior executive team since 2002, Jassy is also responsible for helping to guide the company’s overall direction. 

Adam Selipsky, vice-president, Amazon Web ServicesJoined Amazon Web Services in May 2005. Oversees developer support, product strategy, demand generation, “evangelism” and marketing communications. Before joining Amazon Web Services, Selipsky was vice-president in several areas for RealNetworks.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, Amazon.com Responsible for driving the company’s technology vision. Before joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems.

UK, Iain Gavin, director, Amazon Web ServicesLooks after AWS’s UK and Irish customers. Gavin was one of the first members of the AWS team in Europe. Has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT industry, covering software and digital products.  Charlie Bell, vice-president of utility computing, Amazon Web ServicesResponsible for worldwide engineering, operations and product management for AWS. Bell began his career in 1979 as a developer of mini-computer software used in the engineering of Space Shuttle

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The spot price is set by AWS based on an algorithm that takes into account many factors, such as the last bids, how much excess capacity is available, and other factors like supply and demand. AWS says customers can get up to 66% discount on the on-demand price, by using spot pricing.

All clear?

AWS’s pricing structure is “transparent but complex”, says Gartner, which advises customers to be careful to take in storage and networking-related costs, not just computing costs. “Consolidate and tag your bills, negotiate an enterprise agreement, commit to a minimum volume, and buy reserved instances to get lower prices.”

Data demand

As companies produce ever greater amounts of data, they need bigger repositories (data warehouses). By using AWS, organisations can avoid building extra datacentre capacity or in some cases, having a datacentre at all, says IDC’s Bradshaw.

“Instead of having an enormous capital expenditure, you are effectively paying a rent for the servers you use. You pay flexibly for the service you use. So if you need 100 servers during the day and only 10 at night, then that’s what you pay for,” he says.

Cross-industry users

AWS is used by companies of various sizes and industries. AWS won’t say exactly how many customers it has; only that it has as “hundreds of thousands in more than 190 countries”. They include Samsung, SAP, Netflix, Shell, Dropbox, Yelp, Nasdaq, Adobe, Nasa, Pinterest, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Unilever, IBM, Lionsgate and Farmers Insurance.

Governments and public bodies have been more reticent about using AWS services, says IDC’s Bradshaw. “The only industry where there are potentially problems is government or things linked to government, where people generally like to have their data stored in [the same] country,” he says. Fortunately for AWS, most companies store at least some of their data outside the country in which they are headquartered. Can AWS still grow while cutting prices – piling services high and selling them cheap, like a supermarket?

UK strategy

Iain Gavin, director, at AWS, is responsible for UK and Ireland customers. In an interview with Computer Weekly, he says the UK market is good but says he cannot give figures for recent sales growth, profits or customer numbers because of AWS’s parent company.

The lack of financial information about AWS makes it hard to judge its performance and prospects. But analysts say AWS has a good reputation among CIOs.

Their most common demands are saving money, getting rid of older IT by giving tasks to a supplier, innovation and flexible services, says Gavin, who talks to many UK IT leaders. He gives some examples. One customer, a global business, developed a big new website using AWS’s EC2. Shortly after the site went live, the CIO was told that a bug had been found in the site. The bug, which Gavin says was not due to AWS’s technology, was

UK officeAmazon.co.uk LimitedAmazon Web Services Support teamPatriot Court 1-9 The Grove Slough  Berkshire SL1 1QP

payload sets. He later worked for Oracle and co-founded Server Technologies Group. Stephen E. Schmidt, general manager and chief information security officer, Amazon Web ServicesDuties at AWS include leading product design, management, and engineering development efforts focused on bringing the competitive, economic and security benefits of cloud computing to business and government customers. Before AWS he was a senior executive the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 Jerry Hunter, vice-president of infrastructure, Amazon.comLeads the infrastructure team at Amazon.com. This team consists of datacentre build and management, capacity management, acquisition and management of servers and networking and management of dozens of facilities across the globe. 

Teresa Carlson, vice-president of AWS Worldwide Public SectorResponsible for strategy, sales and business development for Amazon’s Web Services and cloud computing business. She is charged with driving “revenue and partnership strategy” in the public sector.  Before joining Amazon, Carlson was vice-president of federal government business at Microsoft. 

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causing transactions on the site to slow. Customers were unaware of the glitch but the company needed to fix it before it became a major problem.

The company bought 12 extra servers for around two weeks. The extra computing capacity helped the company to fix the problem in the software application.

Cloud computing can help companies innovate by making it easier and cheaper to develop new technology, says Gavin.

Say an IT team wants to test and develop a new SAP application. Traditionally, the team would need to get permission and funding for the project from its CIO. A large project may require a company to buy 20 servers and cost millions of pounds.

It is much easier to try new things if you have a cloud computing supplier, Gavin says. “With AWS, you can spend thousands rather than millions of dollars.” If any idea doesn’t work, a company using cloud computing would probably spend less time and money on the project than it would by doing it all itself, the argument goes. Think of software testing, like a low-key product launch. During this time, the company can get quick feedback from customers and staff.

“I have worked in IT for about 20 years,” says Gavin. “A lot of people won’t admit there is a problem with software applications [because an organisation] has spent so much time and money on it.”

Case study: BP When oil company BP wanted to make its IT more efficient and secure, it used cloud technology from suppliers including AWS. For a multinational company with around 87,000 employees and complex IT, moving to the cloud was a challenge. BP took a cautious and calculated approach to bridge its cloud gap, using a mix of private cloud, public cloud and in-house IT infrastructure.

BP, which is the fifth largest company in the world in terms of revenues in 2012, has a large and expensive IT infrastructure – including 90,000 PCs, 57PB of data, 340 WAN connections and 17,000 servers. Its IT services are run by 3,500 employees and contractors, as well as 7,000 staff from managed service providers.

Speaking in June at Cloud World Forum 2013 in London, BP CIO Dana Deasy said: “Like every large company, we had legacy IT and somehow had to burst into the cloud.”

The oil and gas company wanted to migrate some of its workloads to the cloud environment to gain efficiency and optimise performance and security, he said. The IT team chose nine cloud service providers to provide a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to meet its cloud requirements.

The IaaS platform is provided by AWS.

Although it is public cloud provider Amazon’s service, it is a virtual private cloud (VPC). Amazon VPC allows users to provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch resources in a virtual network that you define. “A majority of AWS customers are demanding Amazon VPC,” said BP’s chief cloud architect, Paul McMohan.

Having benefited from cloud’s agility and scalability, BP’s IT team is now building a technology strategy to look at the cloud ecosystem. “When we started, AWS was leading, and we were testing and developing our services using its services. But now, the cloud marketplace is evolving fast,” said McMohan.

The company is assessing AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud services. “We are also looking at traditional service providers, such as IBM, and then there is OpenStack which is maturing too,” he said.

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Is AWS’s strategy for the UK to sell more advanced services, such as its data warehouse service? Gavin does not elaborate, saying only that its data warehouse service is good value and will appeal to small and large businesses.

“Enterprises say they can do more data warehouse applications [using AWS’s data warehouse service]. For example, they can try 10 to 15 data warehouse applications rather than the five [they did] previously.”

As companies try to make sense of their big data by analysing their customer data – for example, billing and buying patterns – demand for low-cost data warehouses could increase. But if AWS gets into a price war with rivals such as Microsoft and Google, won’t its profit margins and growth suffer?

Gavin does not seem worried about AWS’s price cuts becoming unsustainable. “CIOs have a huge list of things they want to do and a finite list of resources. When we drop prices, we drive more business and volume to our business.”

Innovation

One of AWS’s strengths, according to analysts, is its ability to churn out new products and services.

“Innovation lies at the core of Amazon’s approach to cloud computing. Amazon evolves its service with unprecedented rapidity,” Gartner says in research on AWS. “It may release new features several times a month.”

Flexibility • Companies pay only for what they use, without upfront or long-term commitments. By swapping upfront capital expenditures with ongoing operating expenses, startups can bring their product to market quicker through AWS.

Scalability • Companies can easily increase and/or decrease AWS resources to meet customer demand and manage costs.

Cost-effectiveness • Potential for significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in certain cases, such as applications with spiky and unpredictable use cases.

• Allows employees to focus on their core competencies, and leverage the resources and experience that Amazon provides.

Breadth of offering • The convenience of managing all your IT needs from storage to computing power to database management through one supplier is an attractive proposition to SMEs.

Experience • SMEs can leverage Amazon’s 15+ years of experience in delivering large-scale, global IT infrastructure in a secure fashion.

Lock-up • AWS’s proprietary infrastructure as a service (IaaS) software may make it harder for companies to switch away from AWS once workloads are already committed to an AWS cloud. Competing open source cloud platforms may alleviate some companies’ lock-up concerns.

• There are also bandwidth and time costs associated with moving data in and out of AWS.

Security • Because workloads outsourced to AWS are located on AWS-owned hardware in external datacentres, companies are reluctant to send critical workloads to the cloud due to the perceived lack of control.

• Primary workloads that are outsourced to public clouds are mainly low-sensitivity, high-latency data ROI changes over time.

• Companies in early stages of growth may see attractive ROI from outsourcing to AWS. However, as a company grows, economies of scale may make in-house ROIs more attractive.

Regulatory • Regulatory requirements on data controls.

Source: Morgan Stanley Research

AWS benefits and challenges CHALLENGES BENEFITS

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Nearly all of the technology for AWS is developed in-house at Amazon, according to Gartner.

Amazon has AWS developers, support and sales staff around the world. A substantial percentage of its developers are concentrated in its Seattle headquarters, but it also has developers in many other locations, including low-cost offshore locations.

Challenges

AWS has done well so far, but it is still a young business and has three main challenges. The first and biggest one is growing competition in cloud services – in particular from Google, Microsoft and Rackspace.

Google and Microsoft have “deeper pockets and larger R&D budgets”, according to Baird research. It suggests Microsoft and IBM could become bigger than AWS in the cloud services market. Within infrastructure services, AWS’s main rival is probably IBM, followed by Fujitsu. These companies can promise to keep customers’ data in the UK, for an additional price – a major concern for some organisations.

Although AWS’s growth has been impressive, it has a small share of some big IT markets. For example, Baird estimates that AWS has a 2% share of the market for datacentre systems. The total market for data systems has been estimated at $140bn (£92bn).

Further competition comes from traditional hardware suppliers that have announced hundreds of service provider partnerships to offer public cloud services.

OverviewFounded in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a fast-growing subsidiary of Amazon.com. AWS is one of the biggest providers of cloud computing. It supplies software developers and businesses with services hosted online, ranging from pay-as-you-go computing power (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) and storage (Amazon Simple Storage Service, S3) to databases (Amazon Relational Database Service, RDS) and payments (Amazon Flexible Payments Service, FPS).

The company refuses to disclose its revenue, but research company Baird has estimated AWS’s revenue at $1.5bn in 2012. AWS is best known for two services: Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. AWS is thought to be the market lead for infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

AWS refuses to say how many employees or customers it has – saying only that it has “hundreds of thousands of customers” in more than 190 countries. Its customers include Netflix, Instagram, the CIA, Unilever and The Guardian newspaper. AWS has lots of public sector customers, including more than 500 government agencies and 2,000 education institutions.  

Despite a few high-profile service outages, AWS has a good reputation for reliability and customer service. Analysts praise AWS’s record of innovation. Overall, things look promising for AWS. Demand for cloud computing is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, although AWS has growing competition from cloud infrastructure companies like Rackspace, as well as established software companies such as Microsoft and Google. For big customers, such as the CIA, AWS will build a private cloud.

In 2012, AWS said it would cut the price of its storage service, S3, by 25%. Google and Microsoft also announced price cuts. A price war for cloud services will squeeze AWS’s profit margins. Will it sell more at lower margins or less at higher margins?

Another challenge is keeping up with customer demand. Some analysts believe AWS will probably need to build more datacentres to give it enough computing power to satisfy customers.

Key factsAWS began in 2006Revenue is expected to reach an estimated $1.5bn in 2012, and could reach $24bn (£15.7bn) by 2022, financial services firm Morgan Stanley has forecast.

Main UK customersChannel FourUnileverGuardian NewspaperShazamZooplaTotaljobsTrinity MirroruSwitch

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The second challenge is financial. To maintain growth and boost profit margins, AWS will either need to sell more services, or sell fewer but more higher-value services, such as its new data warehouse service. And the bigger a business becomes, the harder it is to maintain fast growth.

“The challenge for [AWS] is to build a similar market share in some of the major continental economies. To address that they probably need to build another European datacentre,” says IDC’s Bradshaw.

Another challenge is the immaturity of the cloud services market. Getting started on AWS’s infrastructure and platform services is easy but, as Gartner has cautioned, “as customers expand their adoption, they encounter challenges in managing availability, performance, security, cost and internal governance”.

Although cloud infrastructure as a service alleviates hardware-provisioning challenges, it does not eliminate most other IT operations tasks or concerns. “The most successful organisations not only adapt their traditional IT operations processes for the cloud, they also use the unique capabilities of the cloud to transform the way they do IT operations,” says Gartner.

In only seven years, AWS has become one of the biggest suppliers of cloud computing, winning customers in companies of all sizes and industries, and gaining a reputation for reliability and innovation.

Maintaining this impressive performance is getting harder, though, because of growing competition in cloud services from Internet-based companies and traditional hardware suppliers.

AWS may need to build big (and expensive) new datacentres to keep up with growing demand and keep prices low. Getting more customers to use its data warehouse services will also help to ensure that its cloud has a silver lining. n

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Products and services Service Description

Compute Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud

Currently AWS offers a range of operating systems on Amazon EC2, including: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, Windows Server, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo Linux, Debain

Other software can also be run on top of Amazon EC2 to give customers the agility, flexibility and cost savings of the cloud, but using technology they are familiar with. Examples below (this is not an exhaustive list):Databases: Microsoft SQL Server; MongoDB; Apache Cassandra; IBM DB2; MySQL; OracleApplication servers: IBM WebSphere; Zend Server; Adobe ColdFusionContent management: Microsoft SharePoint; Drupal, WordPressBusiness intelligence: SAP BusinessObjects; Oracle; Jaspersoft

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data

Auto ScalingAllows customers to scale their Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions they define

Elastic Load Balancing Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances

Networking Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Allows customers to provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define

Amazon Route 53 A highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service

AWS Direct Connect Allows customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS

Storage Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web

Amazon Glacier A very low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)

Provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances

AWS Import/ExportTransfers data directly on to and off storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network to allow fast transfer to data in to and out of the AWS cloud

AWS Storage Gateway

A service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organisation’s on-premises IT environment and AWS’s storage infrastructure

Content Delivery Network Amazon CloudFront A web service for content delivery

Database Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

A web service that makes it easy to set up, operate and scale a relational database in the cloud

Currently, AWS offers a range of database engines on Amazon RDS, including: MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server