Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a suite of cloud software services created by the Amazon corporation. AWS provides a huge range of functionality around computation, data storage and analysis, content delivery, and application infrastructure.

Regions

All AWS services will run in one or more regions, which map to data centers in various parts of the world. Services running in US-East region, for instance, run in a data center in Virginia, while services running in the EU region, run in a data center in Ireland. Services running in one data center can contact services running in another, but in some instances, services need to be running in the same region in order to integrate properly with one another.

Signing up

Signing up for AWS is simple. Just go to the AWS Homepage and click the "sign up" button, then fill out the requisite information.

All AWS accounts are allotted a certain amount of free usage as part of AWS' "free tier" of service. This includes the first year of a very small EC2 instance, some free S3 storage, etc. For more information on free tier services, see here.

AWS Dashboard

The AWS dashboard is the web interface for interacting with all AWS services. When you first log into your AWS account, you will see options for the various AWS services, broken down into categories. This page will explore some of these services in greater depth below, but you can find out more about the services by clicking on them to see more information about them. Each service should give you a brief introduction the first time you select it, as well as links to getting started guides, FAQs, etc.

AWS for Denigma Developers

EC2

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides virtual machines hosted in Amazon's data centers. EC2 instances are accessible to developers anywhere in the world, provided they have the right credentials. Instances come in a variety of sizes and configurations to allow developers to choose the right machine for the job. For Denigma development, the smallest EC2 instance (Micro) running Ubuntu is the best choice. The AWS free tier allows developers to run a single such instance for free for the first year. The total cost of operation of a single micro Linux instance is about $175/year. Instances can be deleted when not in use to save money. The Denigma AMI, once it is available, will make building instances relatively painless so that developers can free delete instances they aren't using.

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EBS is a simple, lightweight cloud filesystem that allows developers to allocate more storage for EC2 instances. EBS volumes can be formatted like any other raw storage block (like a hard drive), and can be snapshotted and replicated or transferred between EC2 instances. This makes it easy to replicate data across multiple instances. EBS volumes are currently limited to 1TB. For larger data volumes, consider using another service such as S3 or Redshift, both discussed below.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

S3 is a cloud storage service that allows users to store arbitrary files in the cloud. S3 allows users to create "buckets" which they can put their files in. These files can then be accessed from anywhere in the world, as long as the user has the correct permissions. S3 files can also be made public for easy, global distribution of important files. Since every S3 file also has a URL associated with it, sharing files is as easy as putting them in S3, marking them public, and publishing the link.

S3 can also be used to store image or video assets for a website like Denigma.

AMIs

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an image of an EC2 instance that can be used to quickly create instances from a known-good configuration. At some point in the near future, there will be a Denigma AMI that allows developers to launch a Denigma development environment without needing to do any low-level setup.

The newest Ubuntu version (13.04) is available here [http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/].

Relational Database Service (RDS)

Relational Database Service is a cloud SQL database that allows developers to store their SQL-based database in AWS. RDS provides a familiar SQL engine in a scalable fashion, while also automating many common database maintenance tasks. RDS provides a MySQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL database engine, which it automatically patches and updates for the user. RDS also automatically backs up databases with a user-defined retention policy. Additionally, RDS can be run in multiple availability zones to increase data availability should one AZ fail.

Simple DB

Simple DB is another cloud database solution, but unlike RDS, SimpleDB is a NoSQL database. It provides a way for users to store key/value pair data items, and to query these items via web service calls. This provides fast, lightweight data access, but without the relational analysis of RDS. SimpleDB also automatically distributes data across multiple AZs to improve availability, making it a high-throughput, high-redundancy solution for users who don't need the structure and analytical capabilities of a relational database.

AWS for Longevity Researchers

Elastic Map Reduce

Elastic Map Reduce is a Hadoop-based data analysis service that runs on EC2 and S3. This service is ideal for researchers who have a large volume of data that they need to analyze. Elastic Map Reduce allows users to scale the number of resources to the job at hand and abstracts away any tuning or management of Hadoop clusters.

Redshift

Redshift is a low-cost, scalable data warehousing solution in the cloud. It allows fast, easy access to large volumes of data on the order of petabytes. This service is ideal for storing large volumes of research data in a way that will be easy to query and analyze.

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