there are a lot of service providers where you can rent a virtual server…

for example: hetzner, for 3€ per Month you would get 1x CPU core and 2GB of RAM, instead of VPS they also call it “cloud”, it just sounds cooler i guess but is the same thing!? (i hate this renaming marketing crap), but as we all live in market driven capitalism and markets are driven by psychology of people (and a lot of algorithms that trade stocks) do not ask for reason.

in the end the “cloud” is just a bunch of servers in a datacenter somehwere on this planet.j

what might change is the way people use Microsoft Office

  1. purely in the browser?
  2. as a subscription model

hence: Office now runs in the “cloud”/on a (AWS?) server.

why choose Amazon for that?

i still have to find out. IMHO a lot of other service providers are exactly doing the same thing, not even worse.

what virtualization is amazon using?

they used Xen, which is really an excellent hypervisor, but seem to move to KVM (which is natively supported by linux kernel), hetzner allready uses KVM.

Torvalds: “I told them, ‘Look at what you sent me and look at what KVM sent me and ask yourself why do I like the KVM people more than I like you,'” he explained. Xen caused its own messy bed by not working well with the Linux kernel team, kernel experts say. The distro makers were ticked that the Xen team didn’t always keep up with the latest changes to the kernel, so supporting it in their downstream editions would mean they would have to take on the burden of updating it.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220440/opensource-subnet/torvalds-says—virtualization-is-evil-.html

Who is using AWS?

Netflix, Zalando, Daimler apparently.

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html

pros:

  • a lot of big companies are using it

cons:

  • do not own a credit card? out of luck, you will not get an ec2 account.

so let’s give it a testrun

there is no username-dialog in the setup wizard you will have to checkout those “known to work” usernames: AWS  what username i can use to login? it my case (RedHat) it is usr: ec2-user

so the login command is:

ssh -i /path/to/privatekey.pem ec2-user@ec2-server

Please login as the user "ec2-user" rather than the user "root".

[ec2-user@ip-xxx-xx-xx-xx ~]$ hostnamectl 
   Static hostname: ip-xxx-xx-xx-xx.us-east-2.compute.internal
         Icon name: computer-vm
           Chassis: vm
    Virtualization: xen
  Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.5 (Maipo)
       CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:7.5:GA:server
            Kernel: Linux 3.10.0-862.el7.x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64

Amazon is using XEN for virtualization, XEN is an excellent hypervisor i have used it for many years and it is minimalistic and very robust and free 🙂

this is what it looks like, if you really want to have a windows server running directly connected to the internet. (in other words: if you beg for being hacked)

this is what EC2 Amazon Cloud register setup wizard dashboard looks like:

https://console.aws.amazon.com/

Amazon also can sell/register domains for you:

there is a big range of pre installed virtual machines to choose from: a lot of windows server variations are available:

 

this is the hardware you get:

this is the billing/costs/overview dashboard, you can enable some more detailed reporting tool called “Cost Explorer”:

https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/

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