Amazon Web Services

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Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Type of site Web service, cloud computing

Owner Amazon.com

Key people Andy Jassy (CEO)[1]

Website aws.amazon.com

Launched March 2006; 11 years ago[2][3]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides on-demand cloud
computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments, on a paid subscription basis with a
free-tier option available for 12 months. The technology allows subscribers to have at their disposal
a full-fledged virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the internet. AWS's version
of virtual computers have most of the attributes of a real computer including hardware (CPU(s) &
GPU(s) for processing, local/RAM memory, hard-disk/SSD storage); a choice of operating systems;
networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, CRM, etc. Each
AWS system also virtualizes its console I/O (keyboard, display, and mouse), allowing AWS
subscribers to connect to their AWS system using a modern browser. The browser acts as a window
into the virtual computer, letting subscribers log-in, configure and use their virtual systems just as
 they would a real physical computer. They can choose to deploy their AWS systems to provide
internet-based services for their own and their customers' benefit.
The AWS technology is implemented at server farms throughout the world, and maintained by the
Amazon subsidiary. Fees are based on a combination of usage, the
hardware/OS/software/networking features chosen by the subscriber,
required availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Based on what the subscriber needs
and pays for, they can reserve a single virtual AWS computer, a cluster of virtual computers, a
physical (real) computer dedicated for their exclusive use, or even a cluster of dedicated physical
computers. As part of the subscription agreement, [4] Amazon manages, upgrades, and provides
industry-standard security to each subscriber's system. AWS operates from many global
geographical regions including 6 in North America.[5]
In 2017, AWS comprised more than 90 services spanning a wide range
including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application
services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, and tools for the Internet of Things.
The most popular include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage
Service (S3). Most services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality
through APIs for developers to use in their applications. Amazon Web Services offerings are
accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol.
Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large scale computing capacity more
quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm.[6] All services are billed based on
usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways.

Contents
[hide]

1History

o 1.1Growth and Profitability

o 1.2Customer base

o 1.3Significant service outages

2List of products

o 2.1Compute

o 2.2Networking

o 2.3Content delivery

o 2.4Contact Center

o 2.5Storage and content delivery

o 2.6Database

o 2.7Mobile services
 o 2.8Deployment

o 2.9Management

o 2.10Application services

o 2.11Analytics

o 2.12Miscellaneous

3Availability and topology

o 3.1Region and region names table[68]

4Pop-up lofts

5Charitable work

6Key People

7See also

8References

9External links

History[edit]
Further information: Timeline of Amazon Web Services

AWS Summit 2013 event in NYC.

The AWS platform was launched in July 2002 to "expose technology and product data from Amazon
and its affiliates, enabling developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their
own."[3] In the beginning, the platform consisted of only a few disparate tools and services. Then in
late 2003, the AWS concept was publicly reformulated when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black
presented a paper describing a vision for Amazon's retail computing infrastructure that was
completely standardized, completely automated, and would rely extensively on web services for
services such as storage and would draw on internal work already underway. Near the end of their
paper, they mentioned the possibility of selling access to virtual servers as a service, proposing the
company could generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment. [7] In November 2004, the
first AWS service launched for public usage: Simple Queue Service (SQS).[8] Thereafter Pinkham and
lead developer Christoper Brown developed the Amazon EC2 service, with a team in Cape
Town, South Africa.[9]
Amazon Web Services was officially re-launched on March 14, 2006,[3] combining the three initial
service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2. The AWS platform finally provided an
integrated suite of core online services, as Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black had proposed back in
2003,[7] as a service offered to other developers, web sites, client-side applications, and companies.
[2]
Andy Jassy, AWS founder and vice president in 2006, said at the time that Amazon S3 (one of the
first and most scalable elements of AWS) "helps free developers from worrying about where they are
going to store data, whether it will be safe and secure, if it will be available when they need it, the
costs associated with server maintenance, or whether they have enough storage available. Amazon
S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it." [3] His
quote marks a milestone in the Internet's history, when massive managed resources became
available to developers worldwide, allowing them to offer new scalable web-enabled technologies. In
2016 Jassy was promoted to CEO of the division.[10] Reflecting the success of AWS, his annual
compensation in 2017 hit nearly $36 million.[11]
To support industry-wide training and skills standardization, AWS began offering a certification
program for computer engineers, on April 30, 2013, to highlight expertise in cloud computing. [12]
James Hamilton, an AWS engineer, wrote a retrospective article in 2016 to highlight the ten-year
history of the online service from 2006 to 2016. As an early fan and outspoken proponent of the
technology, he had joined the AWS engineering team in 2008. [13]
Growth and Profitability[edit]
In November 2010, it was reported that all of Amazon.com's retail sites had been completely moved
under the AWS umbrella.[14] Prior to 2012, AWS was considered a part of Amazon.com and so its
revenue was not delineated in Amazon financial statements. In that year industry watchers for the
first time estimated AWS revenue to be over $1.5 billion. [15]
In April 2015, Amazon.com reported AWS was profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter
of the year and $265 million of operating income. Founder Jeff Bezos described it as a fast-growing
$5 billion business; analysts described it as "surprisingly more profitable than forecast". [16] In October
2015, Amazon.com said in its Q3 earnings report that AWS's operating income was $521 million,
with operating margins at 25 percent. AWS's 2015 Q3 revenue was $2.1 billion, a 78% increase from
2014's Q3 revenue of $1.17 billion.[17] 2015 Q4 revenue for the AWS segment increased 69.5% y/y to
$2.4 billion with 28.5% operating margin, giving AWS a $9.6 billion run rate. In
2015, Gartner estimated that AWS customers are deploying 10x more infrastructure on AWS than
the combined adoption of the next 14 providers.[18]
In 2016 Q1, revenue was $2.57 billion with net income of $604 million, a 64% increase over 2015 Q1
that resulted in AWS being more profitable than Amazon's North American retail business for the first
time.[19] In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon experienced a 42% rise in stock value as a result of
increased earnings, of which AWS contributed 56% to corporate profits.[20][21]
With a 50% increase in revenues the past few years, AWS is predicted to have $13 billion in revenue
in 2017.[22]
Customer base[edit]

AWS adoption has increased since launch in 2002.

On March 14, 2006, Amazon said in a press release:[3] "More than 150,000 developers have
signed up to use Amazon Web Services since its inception."
 In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 180,000 developers had signed up to use
Amazon Web Services.[23]

In November 2012, AWS hosted its first customer event in Las Vegas.[24]

On May 13, 2013, AWS was awarded an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services under the Federal Risk and Authorization
Management Program.[25]

In October 2013, it was revealed that AWS was awarded a $600M contract with the CIA.[26]

During August 2014, AWS received Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization

for all U.S. Regions.[27]

During the 2015 re:Invent keynote, AWS disclosed that they have more than a million active
customers every month in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000
education institutions and more than 17,500 nonprofits.

On April 5 2017, AWS and DXC Technology (formed from a merger of CSC and HPE)
announced an expanded alliance to increase access of AWS features for enterprise clients in
existing data centers.[28]
Notable customers include NASA,[29] the Obama presidential campaign of 2012,[30] Kempinski Hotels,
[31]
and Netflix.[32]
Significant service outages[edit]

On April 20, 2011, AWS suffered a major outage. Parts of the Elastic Block Store (EBS)
service became "stuck" and could not fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for
service to be fully restored.[33]

On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline
due to a severe storm in Northern Virginia, where AWS' largest data center cluster is located.[34]

On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such
as Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others. The cause was a memory leak bug in an
operational data collection agent.[35]

On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage causing websites such as Netflix to
be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States.[36] AWS cited their Elastic Load
Balancing (ELB) service as the cause.[37]

On February 28, 2017, AWS experienced a massive outage of S3 services in its Northern
Virginia data center. A majority of websites which relied on AWS S3 either hung or stalled, and
Amazon reported within five hours that AWS was fully online again. [38] No data has been reported
to have been lost due to the outage. The outage was caused by a human error made
while debugging, that resulted in removing more server capacity than intended, which caused a
domino effect of outages.[39]

List of products[edit]
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Compute[edit]

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an IaaS service providing virtual servers
controllable by an API, based on the Xen hypervisor. Equivalent remote services
include Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engineand Rackspace; and on-premises equivalents
such as OpenStack or Eucalyptus.

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk provides a PaaS service for hosting applications, equivalent
services include Google App Engine or Heroku or OpenShift for on-premises use.

Amazon Lambda (AWS Lambda) runs code in response to AWS internal or external events
such as http requests, transparently providing the resource required. [40] Lambda is tightly
integrated with AWS but similar services such as Google Cloud Functions and open solutions
such as OpenWhisk are becoming competitors.
Networking[edit]

Amazon Route 53 provides a scalable Managed DNS service providing Domain Name
Services.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) creates a logically isolated set of AWS resources which
can be connected using a VPN connection. This competes against on-premises solutions such
as OpenStack or HPE Helion Eucalyptus used in conjunction with PaaS software.

AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections into AWS data centers.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming traffic across
multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

AWS Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) provides up to 20Gbit/s of network bandwidth to

an Amazon EC2 instance.[41]
Content delivery[edit]

Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects to so-called
"edge locations" near the request
Contact Center[edit]

Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service available to business.

Amazon Connect is based on the same contact center technology used extensively by Amazon
customer service associates around the world.
Storage and content delivery[edit]
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Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable object storage accessible from a
Web Service interface. Applicable use cases include backup/archiving, file (including media)
storage and hosting, static website hosting, application data hosting, and more.

Amazon Glacier provides long-term storage options (compared to S3). High redundancy and
availability, but low-frequency access times. Intended for archiving data.

AWS Storage Gateway, an iSCSI block storage virtual appliance with cloud-based backup.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2.

AWS Import/Export, accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using
portable storage devices for transport.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2) instances.
Database[edit]

Amazon DynamoDB provides a scalable, low-latency NoSQL online Database Service

backed by SSDs.

Amazon ElastiCache provides in-memory caching for web applications.[42] This is Amazon's
implementation of Memcached and Redis.[43]

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides scalable database servers

with MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL support.[44]

Amazon Redshift provides petabyte-scale data warehousing with column-based storage and
multi-node compute.

Amazon SimpleDB allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in

concert with EC2 and S3.

AWS Data Pipeline provides reliable service for data transfer between different AWS
compute and storage services (e.g., Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon
EMR). In other words, this service is simply a data-driven workload management system, which
provides a management API for managing and monitoring of data-driven workloads in cloud
applications.[45]

Amazon Aurora provides a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that has been
created specifically for the AWS infrastructure that claims faster speeds and lower costs that are
realized in larger databases.
Mobile services[edit]

AWS Mobile Hub lets you easily add and configure features for your mobile apps, including
user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push notifications, content delivery, and
analytics.
 Amazon Cognito lets you easily add user sign-up and sign-in to your mobile and web apps.

AWS Device Farm is an app testing service that lets you test and interact with your Android,
iOS, and web apps on many devices at once, or reproduce issues on a device in real time..

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to engage your customers via email, SMS and Mobile Push
messages, tracking overall customer and engagement activity.
Deployment[edit]
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AWS CloudFormation provides a declarative template-based Infrastructure as Code model

for configuring AWS.[46]

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides deployment and management of applications in the cloud.

AWS OpsWorks provides configuration of EC2 services using Chef.

AWS CodeDeploy provides automated code deployment to EC2 instances.

Management[edit]
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Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an implicit service, providing the
authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.

AWS Directory Service a managed service that allows connection to AWS resources with an
existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the
AWS Cloud.

Amazon CloudWatch, provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications,
starting with EC2.

AWS Management Console (AWS Console), A web-based point and click interface to
manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including (but not limited
to) EC2, EBS, S3, SQS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. A mobile
application for Android has support for some of the management features from the console.

Amazon CloudHSM - The AWS CloudHSM service helps to meet corporate, contractual
and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security
Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) a managed service to create and control encryption
keys.
 Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) a highly scalable and fast container management
service using Docker containers.
Application services[edit]

Amazon API Gateway is a service for publishing, maintaining and securing web service APIs.

Amazon CloudSearch provides basic full-text search and indexing of textual content.

Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta version, is a billing and account management
system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder (ETS) provides video transcoding of S3 hosted videos, marketed
primarily as a way to convert source files into mobile-ready versions.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides bulk and transactional email sending.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a hosted message queue for web
applications.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) provides a hosted multi-protocol "push"

messaging for applications.

Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient
applications.

Amazon Cognito is a user identity and data synchronization service that securely manages
and synchronizes app data for users across their mobile devices.[47]

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a low-latency service that streams and resources intensive
applications and games from the cloud using NICE DVC technology.[48]
Analytics[edit]

Amazon Athena is an ETL-like service launched in November 2016. It allows server-less

querying of S3 content using standard SQL.[49]

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Provides a PaaS service delivering Hadoop for
running MapReduce queries framework running on the web-scale infrastructure
of EC2 and Amazon S3.

Amazon Machine Learning a service that assists developers of all skill levels to use machine
learning technology.

Amazon Kinesis is a cloud-based service for real-time data processing over large, distributed
data streams. It streams data in real time with the ability to process thousands of data streams
on a per-second basis. The service, designed for real-time apps, allows developers to pull any
amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up or down as needed. It has some
similarities in functionality to Apache Kafka.[50]

Amazon Elasticsearch Service provides fully managed Elasticsearch and Kibana services.[51]
 Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence, analytics, and visualization tool launched in
November 2016.[52] It provides ad-hoc services by connecting to AWS or non-AWS data sources.
Miscellaneous[edit]

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) allows users to manage complete shipment
process from creating listing to downloading shipment label using API.

Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provided a programmatic web service for sellers to ship
items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon, later replaced by Amazon marketplace
Web service.

Amazon Historical Pricing provides access to Amazon's historical sales data from its
affiliates. (It appears that this service has been discontinued.)

Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) manages small units of work distributed among many
persons.

Amazon Product Advertising API, formerly known as Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S)
and Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), provides access to Amazon's product data and
electronic commerce functionality.

Amazon Gift Code On Demand (AGCOD) for Corporate Customers [53] enables companies to
distribute Amazon gift codes instantly in any denomination.

AWS Partner Network (APN) technical information and sales and marketing support.
Launched in April 2012, the APN is made up of Technology Partners including Independent
Software Vendors (ISVs), tool providers, platform providers, and others. [54][55][56]

Amazon Lumberyard is a freeware triple-A game engine integrated with AWS.[57]

Amazon Chime is a collaboration service for voice, video conference, and instant messaging.
[58]

Availability and topology[edit]

Map showing Amazon Web Services' availability zones within geographic regions around the world.
As of 2017, AWS has distinct operations in the following 16 geographical "regions": [5]

North America (6 regions)

US East (Northern Virginia), where the majority of AWS servers are based[59]

US East (Ohio)

US West (Oregon)

US West (Northern California)

AWS GovCloud (US), based in the Northwestern United States, provided for U.S.
government customers, complementing existing government agencies already using the US
East Region[60]

Canada (Central)

South America (1 region)

Brazil (So Paulo)

Europe / Middle East / Africa (3 regions)

EU (Ireland)

EU (Frankfurt), Germany

EU (London), United Kingdom

Asia Pacific (6 regions)

Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Japan

Asia Pacific (Seoul), South Korea

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

Asia Pacific (Mumbai), India

Asia Pacific (Sydney), Australia

Asia Pacific (Beijing), China

AWS has announced 6 new regions that will be coming online in China, Bahrain, France, Hong
Kong, Sweden, and in the US-East region for government usage.[5]
Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the
designated region.[4] Each region has multiple "Availability Zones",[61] which consist of one or more
discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate
facilities. Availability Zones do not automatically provide additional scalability or redundancy within a
region, since they are intentionally isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading
between Zones. Several services can operate across Availability Zones (e.g., S3, DynamoDB) while
others can be configured to replicate across Zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from
failures.
As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 Million servers across 28
availability zones.[62] The global network of AWS Edge locations consists of 54 points of presence
worldwide, including locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. [63]
In 2014, AWS committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage.[64] In the United States, AWS's
partnerships with renewable energy providers include:

Community Energy of Virginia, a solar farm coming online in 2016, to support the US East
region.[65]

Pattern Development, in January 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm Fowler
Ridge.[66]

Iberdrola Renewables, LLC, in July 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US
East.

EDP Renewables North America, in November 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind
Farm US Central.[67]

Tesla Motors, to apply battery storage technology to address power needs in the US West
(Northern California) region.[65]
Region and region names table[68][edit]

Region Name Region

US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1

US East (Ohio) us-east-2

US West (N. California) us-west-1

US West (Oregon) us-west-2

Canada (Central) ca-central-1

China (Beijing) cn-north-1

 Region Name Region

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) ap-south-1

Asia Pacific (Seoul) ap-northeast-2

Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-1

Asia Pacific (Sydney) ap-southeast-2

Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1

EU (Frankfurt) eu-central-1

EU (Ireland) eu-west-1

EU (London) eu-west-2

South America (So Paulo) sa-east-1

AWS GovCloud (US) us-gov-west-1

Pop-up lofts[edit]
In June 2014 AWS opened their first temporary Pop-up Loft, in San Francisco, to sell their product.
[69]
In May 2015 they expanded to New York City,[70][71] and in September 2015 expanded to Berlin.
[72]
AWS opened their fourth location, in Tel Aviv from March 1, 2016 to March 22, 2016. [73] A Pop-up
Loft was open in London from September 10 to October 29, 2015. [74]

Charitable work[edit]
In 2017 AWS launched a program in the United Kingdom to help young adults and military veterans
retrain in technology-related skills. In partnership with the Prince's Trust and the Ministry of Defence
(MoD), AWS will help to provide re-training opportunities for young people from disadvantaged
backgrounds and former soldiers who have left the military. AWS is working alongside a number of
partner companies including Cloudreach, Sage, EDF Energy and Tesco Bank.[75]
Key People[edit]
Andrew Jassy (CEO)[11]

Werner Vogels (CTO, VP)

See also[edit]
Comparison of file hosting services

Google Cloud Platform

IBM Bluemix

Microsoft Azure Web Sites

Oracle Cloud

Predix (software)