[Amazon’s] Reference architecture for utility computing

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, I attended an Amazon Web Services (AWS) 101 briefing, delivered by Amazon UK’s Ryan Shuttleworth (@RyanAWS).  Although I’ve been watching the “Journey into the AWS cloud” series of webcasts too, it was a really worthwhile session and, when the videos are released to the web, well worth watching for an introduction to the AWS cloud.

One thing I particularly appreciate about Ryan’s presentations is that he approaches things from an architectural view. It’s a refreshing change from the evangelists I’ve met at other companies who generally market software by talking about features (maybe even with some design considerations/best practice or coding snippets) but rarely seem to mention reference architectures or architectural patterns.

During his presentation, Ryan presented a reference architecture for utility computing and, even though this version relates to AWS services, it’s a pretty good model for re-use (in fact, the beauty of such a  reference architecture is that the contents of each box could be swapped out for other components, without affecting the overall approach – maybe I should revisit this post and slot in the Windows Azure components!).

So, what’s in each of these boxes?

  • AWS global infrastructure: consists of regions to collate facilities, with availability zones that are physically separated, and edge locations (e.g. for content distribution).
  • Networking: Amazon provides Direct Connect (dedicated connection to AWS cloud) to integrate with existing assets over VPN Connections and Virtual Private Clouds (your own slice of networking inside EC2), together with Route 53 (a highly available and scalable global DNS service).
  • Compute: Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows for the creation of instances (Linux or Windows) to use as you like, based on a range of instance types, with different pricing – to scale up and down, even auto-scaling; Elastic Load Balancing  allows the distribution of EC2 workloads across instances in multiple availability zones.
  • Storage: Simple Storage Service (S3) is the main storage service (Dropbox, Spotify and others runs in this) – designed for write once read many applications.  Elastic Block Store (EBS) can be used to provide persistent storage behind an EC2 instance (e.g. boot volume) and supports snapshotting, replicated within an availability zone (so no need to RAID). There’s also Glacier for long term archival of data, AWS Import/Export for bulk uploads/downloads to/from AWS and the AWS Storage Gateway to connect on-premises and cloud-based storage.
  • Databases: Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) provides database as a service capabilities (MySQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server). There’s also DynamoDB – a provisioned throughput NoSQL database for fast, predictable performance (fully distributed and fault tolerant) and SimpleDB for smaller NoSQL datasets.
  • Application services: Simple Queue Service (SQS) for reliable, scalable, messages queuing for application decoupling); Simple Workflow Service (SWF) to coordinate processing steps across applications and to integrate AWS and non-AWS resources, to manage distributed states in complex systems; CloudSearch – an elastic search engine based on Amazon’s A9 technology to provide auto-scaling and a sophisticated feature set (equivalent to SOLR); CloudFront for a worldwide content delivery network (CDN), to easily distribute content to end users with a single DNS CNAME.
  • Deployment and admin: Elastic Beanstalk allows one click deployment from Eclipse, Visual Studio and Git  for rapid deployment of applications with all AWS resources auto-created; CloudFormation is a scripting framework for AWS resource creation that automates stack creation in a repeatable way. There’s also Identity and Access Management (IAM), software development kits, Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Notification Service (SNS), ElastiCache, Elastic MapReduce, and  the CloudWatch monitoring framework.

I suppose if I were to re-draw Ryan’s reference architecture, I’d include support (AWS Support) as well some payment/billing services (after all, this doesn’t come for free) and the AWS Marketplace to find and start using software applications on the AWS cloud.

One more point: security and compliance (security and service management are not shown as they are effectively layers that run through all of the components in the architecture) – if you implement this model in the cloud, who is responsible? Well, if you contract with Amazon, they are responsible for the AWS global infrastructure and foundation services (compute, storage, database, networking). Everything on top of that (the customisable parts) are up to the customer to secure.  Other providers may take a different approach.

Creating a virtual machine on Windows Azure in 10 easy steps

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Despite my reservations about Microsoft’s charging model for Windows Azure’s virtual machine (IaaS) capabilities, I was interested enough to take a look after last week’s Microsoft Tech.Days Online event. I signed up for a 90 day (750-hours/month) free trial (which, on the face of it, seems pretty poor in comparison to the 1 year free usage tier from Amazon but, because Amazon have to license Windows, and Microsoft can presumably cross-charge itself, Windows virtual machines are excluded from Amazon’s trial).

It was amazingly simple to get myself up and running with a new virtual machine and I thought I’d demonstrate that here:

  1. If you don’t already have one, sign up for a Windows Azure account and log on to the Windows Azure management console.
  2. On the All Items pane, select Create An Item:
  3. Select Virtual Machine and then From Gallery:
  4. Choose an operating system for the virtual machine, for example Windows Server 2012:
  5. Give the virtual machine a name, supply an Administrator password, and select a size (if you’re using the free trial, then you’ll want to select the small option):
  6. This will be a standalone virtual machine, but it needs a DNS name (for access from the Internet), some storage (I auto-generated the storage) and a region/affinity group/virtual network (I selected the West Europe region, as I’m in the UK and didn’t yet have any virtual networks assigned):
  7. The availability set is not really of any significance when running a single VM, so I left this as none:
  8. Windows Azure will start to provision the virtual machine:
  9. Once completed, the newly-created virtual machine and associate storage will be visible in the console:
  10. Click on the virtual machine name to access the virtual machine dashboard which contains performance information as well as configuration details. From here, you can make further configuration changes (e.g. creating endpoints for access to the virtual machine):