AWS Tutorial: The Basics
AWS Tutorial: The Basics
There are two distinct parts to Amazon web services:
1) The S3 data service which functions as one big hard drive in the sky (this is what Dropbox, Spotify and Amazon Music and many, many other companies are using for their client data storage)
2) The EC2 server service where you can run a server instance in one of three flavors: 1) Linux 2) Ruby on Rails 3) Windows Server
Both these services ( 1 & 2) can talk to each other which is very useful, as you will see once everything is set-up. And the really good news is there is no cost when data is passed between S3 & EC2 services.
What's so good about AWS anyway? - 5 great reasons
1) No server/infrastructure hardware start-up costs - this is HUGE!
2) Prototyping - quickly go from concept to code
3) Scaling - re-clone an already set-up instance to meet greater demand INSTANTLY
4) Security- Very complete firewall security built-in
5) Cost - And last but not least: insanely wonderful pricing that anyone afford, even those living under the Kamogawa like myself.
How much does it cost?
1) S3- 300 yen a month for a terabyte of storage (milage may vary re the number of download data requests). The only time you are charged is when a customer requests data (a download) and then the meter runs at $0.01 per 1,000 requests (that's very cheap, thank you very much).
2) EC2- For a server, the micro server instance, the smallest server instance possible, will cost approximately ¥1,500 per month running 24-7 which is more than powerful enough for prototyping and initial engineering. You can always increase the size of your server instance by cloning it to another bigger server size. By cloning, you simply re-copy your code to a larger server size, but we won't get into the gritty details of that today.
Getting started with S3: 10 easy steps
1) Go to this url: https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3
2) You can sign in using your existing Amazon.com user id and password which you probably already have or you can create one from scratch.
3) Once you are signed in, you should see this screen:
The bucket names you see here are our company's existing buckets or common layman's language 'folders/directories.' To create a new bucket, just click Create bucket, name the bucket (i.e. awstutorial_2) and you are good to go.
4) The easiest way to populate a bucket is use to an FTP client like Transit 4 (www.panic.com) on the Mac or Bucket Explorer (http://www.bucketexplorer.com/) on Windows/Linux.
5) Before we can use these FTP clients, however, we need to create an Amazon Access Key, a very long numerical keychain sequence that protects public entry to your S3 bucket and a Secret Number which you can get by going to this url:
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials
6) Click on Create a new access key and follow the on screen instructions for creating a new key and secret number:
7) Now that you have your AWS Access Key and secret number, you can fire up Transit (http://www.panic.com) or Bucket Explorer (http://www.bucketexplorer.com/). In Transit, just click on the S3 tab at the top of the window, fill in the basic Access key and secret number and then hit the + sign to fill in the rest of the S3 details:
8) Once you are all done you should have a screen like this below. Click Save to save the S3 FTP settings.
9) With the FTP client correctly set up, you can simply launch Transit, select the S3 user name in the Transit menubar pull- down menu and drag and drop data on or off your bucket from your desktop:
10) One last detail which is very important: you must set the permissions to any file in a bucket to 'World' so other users can access/download that file. You can do this by selecting the file name in the Transit S3 window, press Command key + i and then select World and then press the Apply button (don't just close the window or permissions will not be changed - you must press the Apply buuton).
Finally, to get the url of any file in an S3 bucket, just select the file in the Transit window and choose Copy from the Edit menu and you will get a url like the one below returned to the clipboard which brings us to a discussion of how to set-up a Linux server that can talk back to your S3 data or store data right on the server itself (a micro instance has about 600 MB of storage). Click the link below to continue: