The IaaS Challenge: Amazon EC2 - A Layman's Experience

The left hand side of my cloud compass has been craving attention. I admit that I have been pretty ignorant of IaaS because I think the future leans more towards the more abstracted cloud technologies long-term for end-users. But, at the moment, I admit, in the majority of circumstances we still have to bother with hardware, servers, and all that hassle, and my ideal of it all being abstracted away is years off. Now I know that many people in the infrastructure world have been using services like EC2 for a while, I am not claiming to break any new ground here. The purpose of this post is to see if a layman like myself, someone with very little technical infrastructure knowledge or experience, can register for Amazon Web Services and set up an enterprise grade Windows 2008 Server with SQL Server 2008 installed. That's it. Now this is all motivated by the hassle I have had in the past getting through the process for provisioning hardware and software - forms, teams, people, licensing, procurement, logistics, installation team, configuration team etc etc. Wouldn't it be great to press a button to magically produce the hardware/software that I need? And how long would it take?

Timer at the ready...lets see if Amazon can meet my expectations, here's what I did:

• 8pm: Registered for Amazon Web Services. I just used my regular Amazon Id that I use for shopping (!) and ran through some basic screens to register, including entering my card information for billing.  AWS bill for what you use, so no initial payment, no fee for hardware, software, anything.

This gave me access to my Amazon Web Services Account screen.  Here I can view usage reports, billing information etc. But no time for that. I am against the clock, need to create my server!

•  8.05pm: Quick quick! Must create server. I see a link 'AWS Management Console', ah, that looks a likely candidate so I click on that.

Interesting, lots of options. Based on my knowledge 'EC2' is what I am after to create my server. I click on the tab, but I get a message saying that area is still provisioning, but should just take a few minutes. Doh. Well, I may as well see what the other tabs are, all included with my account:


Elastic Beanstalk: Great name. Basically you can deploy Java apps here and Amazon will sort out the hardware somehow.
S3: For storage. I create a 'bucket' in here just for fun. Ah, can upload files up to 5 Terabytes each. I feel the power I am wielding is pretty significant.
EC2: Now, I know a bit about this. Create virtual servers in the cloud. Can create them based on templates, so the one I am gunning for is some kind of beast of a server with Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 pre-installed. But still waiting for this area to be provisioned.
VPC: Virtual Private Cloud: Allows Amazon infrastructure to be a logical extension of a company internal infrastructure - ie extend their firewalls to the Amazon infrastructure etc.

Oh, you can read about the rest at http://aws.amazon.com/......back to the story...

• 8.56pm: I get an email saying EC2 is ready, so I dive in, click on the tab and find an appropriate server template (AMI in Amazon speak), this one looks like what I want:

So I click 'select', run through a wizard and launch my instance, within seconds it is ready. I get a remote desktop shortcut to download to easily access my instance and a password. I double click on the shortcut. I am in.

• 9.10pm: Whoah, I have accessed my server. The spec looks good, I am sure someone with a bit more infrastructure know-how could interpret better, but 64 bit, 7.5gb, 2.25 ghz Xeon processor sounds reasonable anyway:

• 9.20pm: And now I have accessed SQL Server, created my table, and started creating some columns (granted, not the most thrilling of climaxes, but stay with me). Experiment complete!

So, I have provisioned an enterprise grade server, ready to use, with SQL Server 2008 installed, in under 1.5hrs. And I have no expertise in this area really. Am I impressed with AWS? You bet. Of course there are all kinds of questions over cost and issues for actual use in anger which I am not in a position to answer. But an area worth exploring to take away the can of worms that is infrastructure provisioning? Definitely. 'Click click click' and our servers are ready...get me there please.

**Update 14/03/2011: At approximately 11.30pm on the night of 13/03/2011, my experiment AWS account became self-aware and charged me through the nose (or I may not quite have understood the pricing model).....laymen be aware.