Cloud Compute with AWS
Virtual Server Hosting, Container Management, and Serverless Computing
Building and running your organization starts with compute, whether you are building enterprise, cloud-native or mobile apps, or running massive clusters to sequence the human genome. AWS offers a comprehensive portfolio of compute services allowing you to develop, deploy, run, and scale your applications and workloads in the world’s most powerful, secure and innovative compute cloud.
The Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide** evaluates 6 vendors in the global market for Cloud IaaS. Amazon Web Services was placed in the Leader Quadrant for the 9th consecutive year, with the highest position in ability to execute and furthest position in completeness of vision.
275
4x
100 Gbps
7x
100s of millions
84%
*Based on downtime hours from 1/1/18 to 12/31/18 pulled directly from the public service health dashboards of the major cloud providers.
Why AWS Compute
Our vision is to be the compute platform for the world and we are investing and innovating at global scale to support virtually any workload and business need. Having everything is everything and we continue to make our platform easier, faster, and more efficient. With AWS, there are no compromises.
Broadest and deepest platform
AWS offers a far broader selection of services along with much deeper functionality within most of these services than any other cloud provider. We offer choice of operating systems with Linux and Windows and choice of processors with Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and the AWS-built Graviton2 processor. We provide a broad choice of instances either general purpose or optimized for specific needs such as HPC, big data, and analytics, as well as new capabilities with bare metal, attached storage, and enhanced networking. Our rapid pace of innovation has been fueled by the AWS Nitro System, through which AWS re-imagined our virtualization infrastructure. The Nitro System allows us to further reduce costs, and deliver added benefits like increased security and new instances.
Industry-leading security and governance
AWS offers 210 security, compliance, and governance services and key features which is about 40 more than the next largest cloud provider. We also support 89 security standards and compliance certifications including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171, which is meaningfully more than any other cloud provider. For encryption, all AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data and we offer encryption across 116 different AWS services which is 3x more than any major cloud provider. The Nitro System provides enhanced security by continuously monitoring and protecting hardware and firmware, offloading virtualization resources to dedicated hardware and software to minimize attack surface, and providing a locked down security model.
World-class network and storage
We have built the largest global network with 210 points of presence connected by 100 Gbps trans-oceanic cables that deliver customer applications and content anywhere in the world over a private network. With our enhanced networking instance variants (C5n, M5n, M5dn, R5n, R5dn, I3en, G5dn, and P3dn instances), we are also the only cloud provider with compute instances that deliver 100 Gbps of networking throughput, which is one reason why more HPC and machine learning workloads run on AWS than anywhere else. AWS provide a full portfolio of storage options including Amazon EC2 Instance Storage, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and Amazon S3.
Tools to manage costs and complexity
Amazon Lightsail offers the easiest way to get started with AWS. As your usage grows, you can use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to reduce costs up to 90% or to accelerate performance for fault-tolerant workloads such as big data, containers, web services, and CI/CD. AWS offers the most elastic, scalable platform for High Performance Computing. Users can deploy a creative studio in the cloud by scaling rendering, virtual workstations, and data storage globally with AWS Thinkbox Deadline, Amazon EC2 and AWS Cloud storage options such as Amazon FSx, and more.
Compute everywhere
We have the best global infrastructure for running workloads that require high availability with 69 Availability Zones (AZ) across 22 Regions. AWS provides >2x more regions with multiple availability zones than the next largest cloud provider (22 vs. 8). This is one reasons why the next largest cloud provider had 7x more downtime hours than AWS in 2018*. We offer options for edge computing and hybrid cloud including Snowball Edge, VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS Outposts. AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any on-premises facility.
The AWS Nitro System
The AWS Nitro System enables AWS to innovate faster, further reduce cost for our customers, and deliver added benefits like increased security and new instance types. AWS has completely re-imagined our virtualization infrastructure. Traditionally, hypervisors protect the physical hardware and bios, virtualize the CPU, storage, networking, and provide a rich set of management capabilities. With the Nitro System, we are able to break apart those functions, offload them to dedicated hardware and software, and reduce our costs by delivering all of the resources of a server to customers.
The Nitro System is comprised of three main parts: The Nitro Cards, the Nitro Security Chip, and the Nitro Hypervisor. The Nitro Cards are a family of cards that offloads and accelerates IO for functions including VPC, EBS, and Instance Storage, ultimately increasing overall system performance. The Nitro Security Chip enables the most secure cloud platform with a minimized attack surface as virtualization and security functions are offloaded to dedicated hardware and software. Additionally, a locked down security model prohibits all administrative access, including those of Amazon employees, eliminating the possibility of human error and tampering. The Nitro Hypervisor is a lightweight hypervisor that manages memory and CPU allocation and delivers performance that is indistinguishable from bare metal.
Cloud Compute Services
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is flexible service that provides resizable cloud-based compute capacity in the form of EC2 instances, which are equivalent to virtual servers.
Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers you everything you need to build an application or website, including: virtual servers, storage, managed databases, DNS management and static IP addresses – all for a low, predictable price.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Customers such as Duolingo, Expedia, Mobileye, and Cook Pad use ECS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability. ECS is used extensively within Amazon to power services such as Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Lex, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine.
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate makes it easy for you to focus on building your applications. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration.
News for Compute at AWS
February 14th 2019
December 7th 2018
November 28th 2018
Analyst research
Cloud Compute Use Cases
Amazon EC2
Common Use Cases:
- Big data (e.g. Hadoop, Spark)
- Database software (e.g., Aurora, DynamoDB)
- Enterprise applications (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Sharepoint)
- Migrations from on-premises environments, including BYOL
- Open-source cluster management
Amazon Lightsail
Common Use Cases:
- Simple web applications
- Websites, including custom code, WordPress, and eCommerce
- Single-server business software
- Dev/Test environments
- All-in-one solution, including instances, load balancers and databases
Amazon Container Services
Common Use Cases:
- Machine learning
- Microservices
- Batch processes
- Web applications
AWS Lambda
Common Use Cases:
- Web applications
- Mobile backends
- IoT backends
- Stream processing workloads
- File processing workloads
Cloud Compute Details
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is flexible service that provides resizable cloud-based compute capacity in the form of EC2 instances, which are equivalent to virtual servers. You can commission one or thousands of instances simultaneously, and pay only for what you use, making web-scale cloud computing easy. We provide a broad range of instance types optimized to fit different use cases, and choice in how you pay for instances, so you can optimize your application based on business needs while minimizing costs. EC2 Spot Instances spare EC2 capacity offered at up to 90% discounts compared to On-Demand. EC2 Spot Instances can be used with fault-tolerant workloads such as big data, containers, web services, and CI/CD to reduce costs or accelerate performance.
Common Use Cases:
- Big data (e.g. Hadoop, Spark)
- Database software (e.g., Aurora, DynamoDB)
- Enterprise applications (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Sharepoint)
- Migrations from on-premises environments, including BYOL
- Open-source cluster management
Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. Lightsail includes everything you need to jumpstart your project – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP – for a low, predictable price. Launch in seconds with preconfigured operating system and application images and manage your resources easily from our intuitive console. When your app needs advanced features like managed databases, content delivery network, or any of dozens of other features, you can connect these additional AWS services to your Lightsail server. Lightsail plans start at only $5 per month.
Common Use Cases:
- Simple Web Applications
- WordPress Blogs and Websites
- Ecommerce Websites
- Single-server Business Software
Amazon Container Services offer a broad range of products to help you deploy, manage, and scale containers in production. With AWS Fargate you can run serverless containers so you don’t have worry about provisioning, configuring, and scaling virtual machines to run containers. With Amazon ECS you get all the benefits of Fargate with the additional flexibility and control of operating the virtual machines on which your containers are running. Finally, Amazon EKS makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS.
Common Use Cases:
- Machine learning
- Microservices
- Batch processes
- Web applications
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app. Lambda is the core of serverless computing, which lets you build and run applications and services without thinking about servers.
Common Use Cases:
- Web applications
- Mobile backends
- IoT backends
- Stream processing workloads
- File processing workloads
**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from AWS.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. Raj Bala, Bob Gill, Dennis Smith, David Wright, July 2019. ID G00365830.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services, Worldwide, Raj Bala, Julia Palmer, 31 July 2018.
Gartner Critical Capabilities for Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Dennis Smith, Bob Gill, Raj Bala, David Wright, June 2019. ID G00365961
