Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 , EMR, S3 [closed]

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I have been learning aws for quite sometime. I would like to confirm the overall picture of what I have learned so far : I take a normal PC as an analogy to this :

**EC2 similar to arithmetic and logical unit of PC

EMR similar to the OS of PC

S3 similar to the hard-disk of PC**

Please correct me if am wrong and explain me the AWS EC2,EMR,S3 with comparison to another system/service etc.

(Please dont direct to amazon doc links/tutorials as I have crossed all those and I want to confirm my understanding)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I think your analogies are reasonable from a 10,000 foot view. However, I wouldn't say they are correct since there are a lot of subtleties involved. Let me list a few.

EC2 does handle compute side of your application hence it does have a similar role to an ALU has in a microprocessor. However, two major differences. a) EC2 is not like the ALU because EC2 consists of the ability to launch/terminate new compute resources. An ALU by definition is a fixed compute entity while EC2 by definition is a system for provisioning compute resources. Very different. b) EC2 is not stateless but an ALU is. EC2-provided instances have disk, memory, etc. Thus they can carry the entire state of application. S3 is not a required component. In a computer, ALU by itself isn't useful you additional memory is required.

EMR to OS. EMR is really just Hadoop. Hadoop is a task distribution platform. EMR is like an OS in that it does task scheduling. However, a major part of an OS is doing arbitration between different app threads. Whereas, Hadoop is about taking a big data problem and running it in a distributed fashion across many computers. It does no resource arbitration and works on one problem at a time. Thus, its not really like an OS. Apache Yarn to me is closer to an OS btw.

Your S3 analogy is also partially correct. AWS has many types of storage. There is Ephermal storage which is like memory and goes away when an instance dies. There is EBS volumes that are permanent disks attached to instances (or sitting idle) with data on them. S3 is the third type of storage which is like having a web storage. You can upload files to S3 and access them. S3 is very much like a remote disk. To complete, AWS also has Glacier which is archival storage which is even more distant than S3.

Hope this helps.