- 2073 Bhadra · 5 marks
Short note: Amazon cloud
Short answer
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides on-demand cloud computing services such as EC2 virtual servers, S3 object storage, EMR managed Hadoop/Spark, and Redshift data warehouse. Users pay only for resources consumed, enabling elastic scaling without upfront hardware investment.
Write a short note on Amazon cloud.
Amazon cloud means Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing platform from Amazon that provides computing, storage, database and analytics services over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. Users rent resources instead of buying and maintaining hardware.
Main services relevant to big data
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | Resizable virtual servers |
| S3 (Simple Storage Service) | Scalable object storage for any amount of data |
| EMR (Elastic MapReduce) | Managed Hadoop/Spark clusters for processing |
| DynamoDB | Managed NoSQL key-value/document database |
| Redshift | Petabyte-scale data warehouse |
| RDS | Managed relational databases |
| Kinesis | Real-time data streaming |
| Glue / Athena | ETL and SQL queries over data in S3 |
| Lambda | Serverless code execution |
Example
Log files are uploaded to S3, an EMR cluster of EC2 instances runs a MapReduce or Spark job, the result goes back to S3 or Redshift, and the cluster is shut down to stop billing.
Features and advantages
- Elasticity: scale up or down on demand
- Low cost: no upfront investment, pay for use
- High availability through regions and availability zones
- Security and global reach
- Integration with Hadoop ecosystem
Limitations
Dependence on Internet and vendor, data-transfer costs, and data-privacy concerns.
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)