Amazon Web Services (AWS) takes our Editors' Choice for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for its sheer dominance in a number of areas. AWS (whose cost can be determined by contacting the company) will be the best option for most applications and businesses. It is the largest IaaS offering and one with the most comprehensive set of tools as well as a burgeoning list of third-party integrations. Competing platforms may handle some tasks better, but AWS continues to maintain market leadership. A mature product and service offering, AWS ensure most things work well and setup and management are intuitive and familiar. It also has an impressive level of service which smaller players will find hard to match.
AWS has not rested on its laurels, it's improved in almost every area and its basic service levels rival the best the competition has to offer, including Google Cloud Platform (Visit Site at Google Cloud) and IBM Cloud ($9,100.00 at IBM) .
The vast array of services in AWS, which includes an even more vast collection of partners, lets you build exactly the cloud service you need. With its wide variety of other AWS cloud services—everything from cloud databases to e-commerce storefronts—you can build an end-to-end workload complete with management tools and custom-coded apps.
AWS is also a prime example of exactly how key IaaS is becoming, in not only enterprise networks but in small to midsize business (SMB) installations as well. The AWS Cloud operates 54 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions, and one Local Region. The company has plans to add 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions around the world. Keep in mind that an Availability Zone is a cluster of up to six data centers, with more being brought online constantly. In short, if you want to commit to a cloud service that's going to be here not just next year but for the next decade, then AWS is your choice.
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Core Features of AWS
AWS offers the primary services you probably expect when you think of cloud service, including Compute, Storage & Content Delivery, Databases, and Networking. But that's just the beginning. In 2016 AWS launched 1,012 new features and in 2017 it launched 1,430 new features. In addition to the basic four services, AWS offers Mobile, Developers Tools, Management Tools, IoT, security and enterprise apps. At a high level, you can control all of these with extensive admin controls accessible via a secure web client. Tools available here include identity management, auditing, encryption key creation/control/storage, monitoring and logging, and more.
AWS has more options than anyone else in the cloud business. Need a database management system (DBMS)? Check out Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database service. If you need to put terabytes (TB) or even a petabyte (PB) of data into the cloud, then AMS Snowball, a briefcase-size appliance, can do the job. But if you really have a lot of data, there's AWS Snowmobile, an exabyte (EB)-scale data appliance that arrives in a 45-foot, ruggedized custom shipping container delivered by a tractor trailer.
When you need to process all of that data, AWS offers Redshift, a data warehouse; and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), a Hadoop and Spark service. As you would expect when so much data is involved, there's machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) services you can use.
Once you have gotten your head around a tractor trailer full of data, you can go back to the tiny data sets. AWS has the Internet of Things (IoT) covered now as well. AWS also offers more conventional cloud services than its competition. As you'd expect, there are virtual servers, containers, file systems, and block and archival storage. In short, there's nothing you can't do on a cloud that can't be done on AWS. It offers, by far, the widest range of both in-house and third-party software options and choices. If you ever get to the point where AWS can't handle your most complicated jobs, then you have reached a place in which you need to set up your own private cloud.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), AWS supports many Linux distributions as well as Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012, and 2016 on top of the Xen hypervisor. Amazon's cloud also supports Docker containers. And with 54 Availability Zones—each with up to six data centers in 18 geographic regions around the world—AWS is also a no brainer for multinational companies.
Getting Set Up With AWS
Setup in AWS has been significantly improved since the last time we looked at this service. The sheer volume of available services and options means that you'll need to study your options carefully to get exactly what you need. But while Amazon has necessarily delivered one of the more complex IaaS solutions on the market, the setup process has been well thought out and was surprisingly clear. Setting up a basic Amazon cloud is easy, and the available features are well considered.
While the vastness of AWS provides a good market for consultants, unless you need something complex, you may be able to handle setup yourself. I had no trouble bringing up a Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and providing it with the required apps and security options. Some previous complexities within AWS, such as setting up Secure Shell (SSH) connections or using the Windows Remote Desktop have been automated to the point that there was never a problem. Setting up a Windows virtual server consists of specifying the parameters you need, including the number of processors, the amount of memory and the amount and type of storage. You can specify the network connections, your security settings and whether to include a database in the setup. Once you have clicked the right buttons or chosen the right choices from a drop-down menu, you fire it off and wait while it's built.
There are pre-made images available from AWS, including images provided by other users on the AWS marketplace. Some of the choices are free, and some are not.
Once you've set up your server and provisioned it, you can use Amazon's Remote Desktop to log in to it. Unlike some remote desktop utilities, the Amazon software provides a full-screen image that appears identical to one that might be on a local server.
Even thought the test machine was running a 4K monitor that can relegate some screen images to a tiny window stuck in a corner of the screen, the AWS desktop did not do this.
Perhaps even better, there was none of the strangeness that sometimes accompanies remote desktop use. Latency was not an issue. The house pointer acted normally. The Windows Server instance behaved exactly as if it were on a local machine—actually better since it also didn't have the weirdness created by the test facility's crappy kernel-based virtual macine (KVM).
If you have more than one server that you're using at AWS, then the company will let you create a Virtual Private Cloud, which is a logical grouping of your virtual servers. Keep in mind that it's not a private cloud like you'd have in your data center or a co-location site, but it's what most organizations need if they're not processing highly sensitive or classified data.
AWS has improved its documentation over the years, but the service has been made so intuitive that you may not need to refer to it much. Using the AWS Windows Server was essentially the same as administering a physical server in your own data center. While there are times when you'll need to use the command line or PowerShell, they're the same times that you'd use it whether the server was in the cloud or not.
AWS Performance
AWS performance was approximately on par with other cloud services I tested. For these tests, I used Geekbench 4 by Primate Labs, a cross-platform benchmarking app that's designed to treat all platforms the same, regardless of the operating system. This benchmark ran many integer, floating point, and memory tests. I ran the tests on a single vCPU and 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM running Microsoft Windows Server 2016. With this benchmark, the higher the score the better.
The Geekbench 4 was 3021 for single core performance and 2862 for multi-core performance. These numbers were reasonably close to other virtual servers in this test with similar configurations. While Geekbench will test compute performance using GPUs, the instances we tested did not offer GPUs for these virtual servers.
Service-Level Agreements
While throughput is an important part of overall IaaS-provider performance, it's only one half of the equation if you're putting mission-critical infrastructure in the cloud. The other half is the cloud provider's service-level agreement (SLA). Amazon's current SLA is roughly equivalent to those of other cloud providers.
While AWS has a good track record if something does go badly wrong, don't expect to save your bacon with the SLA. AWS's default SLA, like all cloud SLAs, will not cover the cost to your business if the service goes down. It will just provide you with credit for use with AWS. What this means is that you will need to make arrangements for backup and recovery, and you'll probably need to have agreements for disaster recovery services when you need them.
Pricing and Contract
Pricing on cloud services in general is a source of extreme complication. It's not that the pricing is intentionally hard to follow, but rather, that there are so many options, each individually priced, that you'll need to configure what you want to find out the price. Amazon has pricing calculators to help you, but those are complicated, too. This is a situation in which you may want to ask for help from Amazon's sales staff. That's one reason why a popular service for AWS cloud consultants is simply calculating an accurate price for a proposed cloud solution.
While AWS has been aggressively lowering its prices recently, so have its competitors, including Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace ($10,300.00 at Rackspace) . However, the way AWS is set up, it's difficult to determine in advance what your cloud configuration is going to cost. As a starting point, the VM I ran the simple benchmark app in would cost about $14 per month. AWS also has spot pricing and reserved instances that can lower the bill by up to 90 percent and up to 75 percent, respectively, from on-demand pricing for EC2 images and other services that leverage EC2 (for example, Amazon EMR).
The RightScale cloud calculator is no longer available, so we attempted to price an Amazon solution matching the previous standard configuration. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't offer anything closely resembling the standard configuration so, at our request, its staff priced out a configuration that was as close as possible. This included three on-demand micro instances: a web server, load balancer, and a hosting www site. These were supported by two on-demand micro web servers for peak demand and a small, reserved, one-year, light-utilization DR server.
The 300GB S3 Standard storage for the database backup and a 4GB S3 Standard storage for the web server are no longer available in that form. There's also no longer a data transfer allowance; you're simply charged for what you use. For tech support, I went with the included ticket system. This simple web app would cost approximately $2,500 per year according to the pricing provided by Amazon. This is a significant reduction from the original pricing, but it's not the best pricing for this app.
Amazon said that today's cloud technology has bypassed the type of setup we used previously and suggested another approach instead. For both a lower cost and higher resiliency, the company anticipates that customers will take advantage of EC2 Auto Scaling across multiple Availability Zones. EC2 Auto Scaling will bring both the ability to satisfy peak demand and to provide resiliency in the case of failure, according to Amazon.
Overall, if you manage to put AWS together the way you want it, then you'll likely have a reasonably low price and decent performance. Plus, you will also have the most options and the greatest flexibility. For most organizations, AWS is your best choice. This is why it receives our Editors' Choice award in this IaaS solutions review roundup.
Amazon Web Services can run various services and support a range of operating systems. Its universal appeal is further strengthened by its intuitive setup process, management, and monitoring features earning it our Editor's Choice selection in IaaS solutions.
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