Whitepapers

September 2016

This whitepaper focuses on two specific approaches to deploying the Jenkins open-source automation server on AWS. First, the traditional deployment on top of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Second, the containerized deployment that leverages Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS). These approaches enable customers to take advantage of the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) capabilities of Jenkins. Using an extensive plugin system, Jenkins offers options for integrating with many AWS services and can morph to fit most use cases (e.g., traditional development pipelines, mobile development, security requirements, etc.).

September 2016

AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS easily and securely, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases. The service supports both homogenous and heterogeneous migrations and can also be used for continuous data replication with high-availability. This whitepaper outlines best practices for using AWS DMS. 

August 2016

Industry standard rules of thumb for high-workload consolidation when migrating physical servers or desktops into a virtual environment don’t ensure optimal CPU performance after consolidation. This paper examines a proven scientific methodology and detailed examples for benchmarking CPU performance for different CPU generations to get that optimal performance. Learn how to choose Amazon EC2 instance types based on CPU resources and best practices for CPU selection with Amazon EC2.

August 2016

The AWS network has been architected to permit you to select the level of security and resiliency appropriate for your workload. To enable you to build geographically dispersed, fault-tolerant web architectures with cloud resources, AWS has implemented a world-class network infrastructure that is carefully monitored and managed. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of the network architecture, access points, transmission protection and fault-tolerant design.

August 2016

Amazon Web Services provides cloud-based analytics services to help you process and analyze any volume of data, whether your need is for managed Hadoop clusters, real-time streaming data, petabyte scale data warehousing, or orchestration. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of EMR, Kinesis, Data Pipeline, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudHSM, and more. 

August 2016

Amazon Web Services offers a variety of managed services to use with your applications, including services that provide application streaming, queueing, push notification, email delivery, search, and transcoding. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of the CloudSearch, SQS, SNS, SWF, SES and more. 

August 2016

Not only is security built into every layer of the AWS infrastructure, but also into each of the services available on that infrastructure. AWS services are architected to work efficiently and securely with all AWS networks and platforms. Each service provides extensive security features to enable you to protect sensitive data and applications. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of the hypervisor usage, instance isolation and auto scaling. 

August 2016

Amazon Web Services provides a number of database solutions for developers and businesses— from managed relational and NoSQL database services, to in-memory caching as a service and petabyte-scale data-warehouse service. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of DynamoDB, RDS, encryption and network isolation. 

August 2016

Amazon Web Services provides low-cost data storage with high durability and availability. AWS offers storage choices for backup, archiving, and disaster recovery, as well as block and object storage. This paper discusses some of the security aspects of storage, including data access, data transfer, durability and access logs. 

August 2016

This document is intended to answer questions such as, “How does AWS help me protect my data?” Specifically, AWS physical and operational security processes are described for the network and server infrastructure under AWS’ management, as well as service-specific security implementations.

August 2016

In this paper we present the Random Cut Forests algorithm, which detects anomalies in real-time streaming data. We have implemented this algorithm as a built-in SQL function in Amazon Kineis Analytics, which is a fully managed AWS service that makes it easy to analyze streaming data with SQL in real-time. This paper was published in the Proceeedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, New York, NY, USA, 2016. JMLR: W&CP volume 48. Copyright 2016 by the author(s).

August 2016

Blue/green deployment is a technique for releasing applications by shifting traffic between two identical environments running different versions of the application. Blue/green deployments can mitigate common risks associated with deploying software, such as downtime and rollback capability. This paper provides an overview of the blue/green deployment methodology and describes techniques customers can implement using Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and tools. This paper also addresses considerations around the data tier, which is an important component of most applications.

August 2016

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) provides cryptographic keys and operations scaled for the cloud. AWS KMS keys and functionality are used by other AWS cloud services, and you can use them to protect user data in your applications. This white paper provides details on the cryptographic operations that are executed within AWS when you use AWS KMS.

July 2016

The goal of this whitepaper is to help you understand how to deploy SQL Server databases on AWS. You can run SQL Server databases on Amazon RDS as a fully managed service or on Amazon EC2 on your own. We review in detail how to provision and monitor your SQL Server databases, and how to manage scalability, performance, availability, security, and backup and recovery, in both Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2. This paper also describes how you can set up a Disaster-Recovery solution between an on-premises SQL Server environment and AWS, using native SQL Server features like log shipping, replication, and AlwaysOn Availability Groups.

July 2016

If your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account was created before 2013, your Amazon RDS MySQL instance might not be in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This whitepaper outlines the requirements and detailed steps needed to migrate such Amazon RDS MySQL databases to VPC with minimal downtime using RDS MySQL Read Replicas and ClassicLink.

July 2016

One of the most challenging steps required to deploy an application infrastructure in the cloud involves the physics of moving data into and out of the cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a number of services for moving data, and each solution offers various levels of speed, security, cost,and performance. This paper outlines the different AWS services that can help seamlessly transfer on-premises data to and from the AWS Cloud. 

July 2016

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a leader in digital experience delivery. It is a powerful, enterprise-ready solution that provides businesses with an easy way to deliver immersive web experiences, build a brand, drive demand, and extend reach to audiences across the globe. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leader in cloud services and infrastructure providing a flexible, cost effective, and easy-to-use computing platform. Combining AEM and AWS can be an effective method to deliver personalized digital experiences to your customers.

This whitepaper outlines some of the main benefits and describes some best practices that should be applied when deploying AEM on AWS. The content targets technical leaders responsible for deploying and managing AEM, allowing them to get started quickly on deploying AEM on AWS.

July 2016

Applications in AWS Marketplace that require access to AWS resources must follow security best practices to help protect customers from potential security vulnerabilities. AWS Marketplace requires application authors to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and do not permit the use of access or secret keys. This requirement affects two types of applications: applications that interact with AWS resources to operate, and applications that interact with AWS resources on behalf of specific users, either in the same or in different AWS accounts. Temporary credentials can be obtained by using IAM roles for EC2 instances. Applications can then interact with AWS resources without needing to store, secure, and manage a user's access keys.

This whitepaper discusses how applications in AWS Marketplace that require access to AWS resources can use IAM roles for authentication, to help protect customers from potential security vulnerabilities.

July 2016

This whitepaper covers the Security Perspective, which focuses on helping organizations achieve risk management and compliance goals, with guidance enabling rigorous methods to describe structure of security and compliance processes, systems, and personnel.

July 2016

Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed virtual desktop computing service running on the AWS cloud. The service can easily be integrated into existing IT systems and processes, and this whitepaper describes the best practices for doing this. The paper covers network considerations, directory services, user authentication, security, monitoring, and logging. It is intended for IT administrators who are responsible for managing end user computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in corporate IT environments.

June 2016

This document is intended to answer questions such as “How does AWS help me ensure my data are secure?” Specifically, AWS physical and operational security processes are described for network and infrastructure under AWS’ management, as well as service-specific security implementations.

June 2016

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, enterprise grade, cloud-native relational database engine that overcomes many limitations of traditional relational database engines. This whitepaper discusses the best practices for migrating your existing databases to Amazon Aurora. It presents migration considerations and the step-by-step process for migrating open-source and commercial databases to Amazon Aurora with minimal disruption to the applications that are using the database.

June 2016

This paper is intended for enterprise solution architects, backup architects, and IT administrators who are responsible for protecting data in their corporate IT environments. It discusses production workloads and architectures that can be implemented using AWS to augment or replace a backup and recovery solution. These approaches offer lower costs, higher scalability, and more durability to meet Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and compliance requirements.

April 2016

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an exciting set of technologies, offering significant new capabilities to customers. Implementing an IoT strategy can be very complicated. This whitepaper outlines core tenets that should be considered when developing a strategy for IoT. It will help you to understand the benefits of the cloud in supporting an IoT solution, and provides an overview of AWS services that should be part of an overall IoT strategy.

April 2016

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Dedicated Hosts can help enterprises reduce costs by allowing the use of existing server-bound licenses. Many customers can also use Dedicated Hosts to address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. Oftentimes, customers using Dedicated Hosts want to continuously record and evaluate changes to their infrastructure to stay compliant with license terms and regulatory requirements.This paper outlines the ways in which you can leverage AWS Config and AWS Config Rules to monitor license compliance on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts.

April 2016

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, enterprise-class relational database engine designed and optimized for the cloud. In many ways, Amazon Aurora is a game changer and helps overcome the limitations of traditional relational database engines. This whitepaper covers Amazon Aurora architecture, scalability, performance, and migration paths from other databases. It will help you understand the benefits of Amazon Aurora and walk you through the steps required to create and connect to your first Amazon Aurora database.

March 2016

Many leading enterprises have found that a well-planned “lift and shift” move to the cloud can result in an immediate business payoff. This whitepaper is intended for IT pros and business decision makers in IT organizations who are looking at modernizing existing business-critical applications built on Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

March 2016

This whitepaper will help you understand how to effectively estimate the costs of running your specific project on AWS. It provides several examples that leverage the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator. For each example, this paper discusses its architecture, example usage of each service, cost breakdown for each service, and the total estimated monthly charge.

March 2016

This whitepaper explains how to use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to estimate the cost of a scalable and highly available Microsoft SharePoint Server architecture on AWS. The techniques described can also be applied to other Windows workloads on AWS. The paper focuses on Amazon EC2 and AWS storage services that are common to most Microsoft infrastructure deployments, and also provides money-saving tips.

March 2016

Data engineers, data analysts, and developers in enterprises across the globe are looking to migrate data warehousing to the cloud to increase performance and lower costs. This whitepaper discusses a modern approach to analytics and data warehousing architecture, outlines services available on AWS to implement this architecture, and provides common design patterns to build data warehousing solutions using these services.

March 2016

Real Time Bidding or RTB is becoming increasingly important for Digital Advertising industry and has seen significant growth in recent years especially in mobile. This whitepaper helps architects, engineers, advertisers, and developers understand RTB and the services available in AWS that can be used for RTB. It will showcase the RTB platform reference architecture used by customers today, as well as provide additional resources to get started with building an RTB platform on AWS.

February 2016

The focus of this paper is the Cost Optimization pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. It provides guidance to help customers apply best practices in the design, delivery, and maintenance of AWS environments.

February 2016

This whitepaper paper provides prescriptive guidance to cloud architects so that they can build highly scalable and elastic applications optimized to run in AWS cloud. It discusses cloud concepts and highlights various design patterns and best practices.

February 2016

This whitepaper covers the Maturity Perspective, which focuses on assessing an organization’s current state, identifying a future state, and creating roadmaps to achieve the future state of cloud adoption.

February 2016

This paper covers the Process Perspective. The considerations in this perspective can help you ensure that all your enterprise processes are in place to plan, implement, and operate cloud-based IT capabilities.

February 2016

This whitepaper provides an overview of the different big data options available in the AWS Cloud for architects, data scientists, and developers. For each of the big data analytics options, this paper describes the following: Ideal usage patterns, Performance, Durability and availability, Cost model, Scalability, Elasticity, Interfaces, and Anti-patterns. The paper concludes with scenarios that showcase the analytics options in use, as well as additional resources for getting started with big data analytics on AWS.

Services covered in this whitepaper include Amazon Kinesis Streams, AWS Lambda, Amazon ElasticMapReduce, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Amazon QuickSight. In addition, the paper also touches on Amazon EC2 instances, available as an option for self-managed big data applications.  

January 2016

This whitepaper covers the Operations Perspective of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), which focuses on operating an AWS-enabled IT environment efficiently. The CAF provides best practices and prescriptive guidance to accelerate an organization's move to cloud computing. The CAF guidance is broken into a number of areas of focus that are relevant to implementing cloud-based IT systems. These focus areas are called perspectives. Each perspective is covered in a separate whitepaper.

January 2016

This whitepaper covers the People Perspective, which focuses on effectively planning for and monitoring the impact of a cloud adoption initiative on the culture and people in the organization.

January 2016

Increasingly, the mode of delivery for enterprise solutions is turning toward the software as a service (SaaS) model, but architecting a SaaS solution can be challenging. There are multiple aspects that need to be taken care of, and a variety of options for deploying SaaS solutions on AWS. This paper covers the different SaaS deployment models and the combination of AWS services and AWS Partner Network (APN) partner solutions that can be used to achieve a scalable, available, secure, performant, and cost-effective SaaS offering.

January 2016

This whitepaper provides an overview of Cassandra and its implementation on the AWS cloud platform. It also talks about best practices and implementation characteristics such as performance, durability, and security, and focuses on AWS features relevant to Cassandra that help ensure scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery in a cost-effective manner. 

January 2016

Local and regional governments around the world are using the cloud to transform services, improve their operations, and reach new horizons for citizen services. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud enables data collection, analysis, and decision making for smarter cities. This whitepaper provides strategic considerations for local and regional governments to consider as they identify which IT systems and applications to move to the cloud. Real examples that show how cities can stop wasting money, move faster, and innovate.

January 2016

This whitepaper is intended for architects and developers in the financial services sector who are looking to expand grid computation onto AWS. It outlines the best practices for managing large grids on the AWS cloud platform and offers a reference architecture to guide organizations in the delivery of these complex systems.

January 2016

Cloud initiatives require more than just the right technology. They also must be supported by organizational changes, such as people and process changes. This paper is intended for IT service management (ITSM) professionals who are supporting a hybrid cloud environment that leverages AWS. It outlines best practices for asset and configuration management, a key area in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), on the AWS cloud platform.

December 2015

This whitepaper offers comprehensive architectural guidance for developing, deploying and managing static websites in the AWS cloud. You will learn how to achieve extreme scalability, elasticity and resiliency with minimal management and operating costs so low as to be insignificant.

December 2015

This whitepaper is designed to help architects and developers understand the different storage services and features available in the AWS cloud. We provide an overview of each storage service or feature and describe usage patterns, performance, durability and availability, scalability and elasticity, security, interfaces, and the cost model.

December 2015

To achieve full benefits of moving applications to the AWS platform, it is critical to design a cloud migration model that delivers optimal cost efficiency. This includes establishing a compelling business case, acquiring new skills within the IT organization, implementing new business processes, and defining the application migration methodology to transform your business model from a traditional on-premises computing platform to a cloud infrastructure.

November 2015

This whitepaper covers the Platform Perspective of the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), which focuses on designing, implementing, and optimizing the architecture of the AWS technology that you use in your cloud adoption initiative.

November 2015

This whitepaper shows you how innovations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) can change how you can design multi-tiered architectures for popular patterns such as microservices, mobile backends, and public websites. Architects and developers can now use an implementation pattern that includes Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to reduce the development and operations cycles required to create and operationally manage multi-tiered applications.

November 2015

This whitepaper provides an overview of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). The AWS CAF provides best practices and prescriptive guidance to accelerate an organization's move to cloud computing. The CAF guidance is broken into a number of areas of focus that are relevant to implementing cloud-based IT systems. These focus areas are called perspectives. The seven perspectives are business, platform, maturity, people, process, operations and security.

November 2015

This whitepaper covers the Business Perspective of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), which focuses on aligning IT strategy to business strategy and evaluating the cost and value derived through AWS cloud adoption. The CAF provides best practices and prescriptive guidance to accelerate an organization's move to cloud computing. The CAF guidance is broken into a number of areas of focus that are relevant to implementing cloud-based IT systems. These focus areas are called perspectives. Each perspective is covered in a separate whitepaper.

October 2015

This document provides information to assist customers who want to use AWS to store content containing personal data. Specifically, this document describes how customers can use AWS services in compliance with Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (“Directive”).

October 2015

This paper describes potential use cases and security technologies for running Windows Storage Spaces in AWS over the Server Message Block (SMB) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocols. To embrace the DevOps philosophy of “infrastructure as code,” Windows PowerShell scripts are provided to quickly deploy Storage Spaces in AWS. The paper is intended for Microsoft Windows IT professionals and developers who are interested in combining Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces with the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) service.

October 2015

This whitepaper describes the AWS Well-Architected Framework.  The framework enables you to assess and improve your cloud-based architectures to better understand the business impact of your design decisions. This paper addresses general design principles, as well as specific best practices and guidance in four conceptual areas (security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization). These four areas are defined as the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. The framework provides a set of questions that allow you to assess an existing, or proposed architecture, and also provides a set of AWS best practices for each pillar. Using this framework in your architecture will help you produce more stable and efficient systems.

August 2015

This paper describes a range of high performance computing (HPC) applications that are running today on Amazon Web Services (AWS). You will learn best practices for cloud deployment, for cluster and job management, and for the management of third-party software. This whitepaper covers HPC use cases that include highly distributed, highly parallel grid computing applications, as well as more traditional cluster computing applications that require a high level of node-to-node communications. We also discuss HPC applications that require access to various types of high performance data storage.

July 2015

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a scalable cloud computing platform designed for high availability and dependability, providing the tools that enable you to run a wide range of applications. Helping to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and data is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining your trust and confidence. This document is intended to provide an introduction to AWS’s approach to security, including the controls in the AWS environment and some of the products and features that AWS makes available to customers to meet your security objectives.

July 2015

Many enterprises have successfully migrated some of their on-premises IT workloads to the cloud. An enterprise must also deploy an IT Service Management (ITSM) framework so it can efficiently and effectively operate those IT capabilities. This whitepaper outlines best practices for event management in a hybrid cloud environment using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

July 2015

Businesses of all sizes maintain file server infrastructure for storage and sharing of corporate documents. Although many businesses have recovery plans in place, they are often rarely tested or rely on traditional backup solutions that may not always meet the recovery time objectives (RTO) or recovery point objectives (RPO), particularly for large file servers.

This paper describes a step-by-step approach to implementing a proven and cost- effective disaster recovery solution for Windows-based file servers that can minimize data loss and provide fast, automatic recovery of file services running on the AWS cloud.

July 2015

Whether on-premises or in the cloud, managing a large Microsoft Windows Server fleet can be challenging. Microsoft Active Directory addresses many of these challenges by centralizing credentials, enforcing server configurations, and more. AWS Directory Service lets you can connect your existing Active Directory domain to the AWS cloud using AD Connector or launch a new standalone domain in AWS using a Simple AD directory.

This white paper describes how AWS Directory Service and the Simple Systems Manager (SSM) features within the Amazon EC2 API can be used to manage your Windows Server fleet in the AWS cloud.

June 2015

Lambda architecture is a data-processing design pattern to handle massive quantities of data and integrate batch and real-time processing within a single framework. This design pattern can be implemented on AWS.

June 2016

This paper is intended for customers who want to improve resiliency of their applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) against Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The paper provides an overview of Distributed Denial of Service attacks, techniques that can help maintain availability, and reference architectures to provide architectural guidance with the goal of improving your resiliency.

June 2015

In this whitepaper, you’ll see how you can use AWS to adapt to a changing interconnected market, and take advantage of global responsiveness and minimal barriers to innovation. AWS can help you create value for the business in addition to saving costs on infrastructure.

May 2015

Considering the expense and complexity of maintaining a traditional data center, it’s no wonder that companies are turning to cloud computing as a way to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and build their business. With cloud computing, companies have access to a scalable platform; low-cost storage; database technologies; and management, deployment, and development tools on which to build enterprise-level solutions.

May 2015

In-memory caching improves application performance by storing frequently accessed data items in memory, so that they can be retrieved without access to the primary data store. Properly leveraging caching can result in an application that not only performs better, but also costs less at scale. Amazon ElastiCache is a managed service that reduces the administrative burden of deploying an in-memory cache in the cloud. Beyond caching, an in-memory data layer also enables advanced use cases, such as analytics and recommendation engines. This whitepaper lays out common ElastiCache design patterns, performance tuning tips, and important operational considerations to get the most out of an in-memory layer.

May 2015

Covered entities subject to FERPA are turning to cloud computing as a highly efficient way to manage and secure vast amounts of education records and student data. Security is a core functional requirement of FERPA, requiring that mission-critical information be protected from accidental or deliberate theft, leakage, integrity compromise, and deletion. This Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance whitepaper is designed to assist educational agencies and institutions that are considering the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for education data.

May 2015

Network Attached Storage (NAS) software is commonly deployed to provide shared file services to users and applications. SoftNAS Cloud, a popular NAS solution that can be deployed from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, is designed to support a variety of market verticals, use cases, and workload types. Increasingly, SoftNAS is deployed on the AWS platform to enable block and file storage services through Common Internet File System (CIFS), NFS, and iSCSI. This paper addresses architectural considerations when deploying SoftNAS Cloud on AWS. It also provides best practice guidance for security, performance, high availability, and backup.

April 2015

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) for managing users and user permissions in AWS. Outside the AWS cloud, administrators of corporate systems rely on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to manage identities. By using role-based access control (RBAC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, corporate IT systems administrators can bridge the IAM and LDAP systems and simplify identity and permissions management across on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures.

April 2015

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, NoSQL database service. Many workloads implemented using a traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) are good candidates for a NoSQL database such as DynamoDB. This whitepaper details the process for identifying these candidate workloads and planning and executing a migration to DynamoDB.

April 2015

This paper describes an ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application written in C# that invokes C++ functions running on the GPU for matrix multiplication. Since matrix multiplication is of order N-cubed, multiplying two 1024 x 1024 matrixes requires over one billion multiplications, and is therefore an example of a compute-intensive operation that would be a good candidate for GPU programming. This paper shows how to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to launch a Microsoft Windows Server instance with an NVIDIA GPU in Amazon EC2 on AWS. It is intended for Windows developers who are interested in writing high-performance parallel code in AWS using the Microsoft C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) library.

April 2015

AWS is a natural complement to Linux containers because of the wide range of scalable infrastructure services upon which containers can be deployed. AWS Elastic Beanstalk includes integrated support for Docker containers and Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) was designed from the ground up to manage Docker containers at scale. Amazon ECS is built upon several key features, such as cluster management and support for multiple container schedulers, to facilitate and orchestrate large-scale deployments of containers across managed clusters of Amazon EC2 instances.

March 2015

AWS provides number of options for provisioning of infrastructure and deployment of applications. Each service has a unique approach for managing application deployments and offers various strategies for updating your application. This whitepaper is intended for anyone looking for information on different deployment options in AWS. It lays out common features available in deployment services (such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS OpsWorks and AWS CodeDeploy), articulates strategies for updating application stacks, and presents few examples of hybrid deployment models for complex workloads

March 2015

This whitepaper discusses the steps required to set up and configure AWS resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes to install a new SAP HANA database instance or to scale out your existing SAP HANA database instance. It also explains how to configure the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for your SAP HANA deployments. The guide complements the SAP HANA Quick Start to support additional customization scenarios.

February 2015

This whitepaper provides technical guidance on deploying the MarkLogic NoSQL database on AWS. It also provides an overview of general best practices and examines important MarkLogic implementation characteristics such as performance, durability, and security. Additionally, we also outline key integrations and configurations that are unique to AWS to support scalability, high- availability, and fault-tolerance with MarkLogic deployments.

January 2015

This whitepaper details how you could use AWS OpsWorks to manage complex multi-tiered applications, from designing a scalable and flexible architecture to continuously provisioning and deploying infrastructure and applications. We also highlight how monitoring and security play an important role in such deployments and how AWS OpsWorks enables you to easily manage these aspects.

January 2015

In this whitepaper, we describe tools and techniques to provision new instances, configure the instances to meet your requirements, and deploy your application code. We also introduce strategies to ensure that your instances remain stateless, resulting in an architecture that is more scalable and fault tolerant. The techniques we describe allow you to scale your service from a single instance to thousands of instances while maintaining a consistent set of processes and tools to manage them.

January 2015

The acquisition of cloud services is unlike most traditional technology acquisitions in the public sector, and procurement considerations should be a key element of the cloud acquisition process in order to reap the benefits of decreasing cloud costs, increasing performance through improved infrastructure, and enhanced functionality through system-wide innovation. This paper highlights the top ten public sector cloud procurement considerations and is intended to encourage deeper thinking around cloud procurement strategy and how old world procurement strategies do not easily fit with a cloud procurement.

December 2014

This paper provides an overview of how public sector organizations are architecting for genomic data security and compliance in AWS and highlights unique public sector customer examples.

December 2014

Enterprise backup, restore and recovery is still a challenge for many companies. In this whitepaper, learn how AWS can alleviate many of the pains and challenges associated with backup, restore and recovery, including different approaches, reference architectures, and 3rd party vendors that can help to integrate your on-premises storage environment with Amazon S3 and Glacier.

December 2014

This whitepaper gives system administrators guidance on getting started with WordPress on AWS and shows them how to improve the cost efficiency of the deployment as well as the end user experience. It also provides a reference architecture that addresses common scalability and high availability requirements.

January 2015

This whitepaper demonstrates how to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to implement a highly available and scalable deployment of WordPress. It includes the use of additional services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon ElastiCache to improve the efficiency and performance of the installation.

December 2014

AWS offers you the ability to run your Oracle Database in a hosted IaaS environment. Running Oracle Database on AWS is very similar to running Oracle Database in your data center. However, there are a number of AWS platform considerations relating to security, storage, compute configurations, management, and monitoring that will help you get the most out of your Oracle Database implementation on AWS. This whitepaper provides the best practices for achieving optimal performance, availability, and reliability, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while running Oracle Database on AWS. The target audience for this whitepaper includes database administrators, enterprise architects, systems administrators, and developers who would like to run Oracle Database on AWS.

December 2014

AWS provides a comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying enterprise-grade solutions in a rapid, reliable, and cost-effective manner. Oracle Database is a widely used relational database management system that is deployed in enterprises of all sizes to manage various forms of data in many phases of business transactions. This whitepaper describes the preferred methods for migrating an Oracle Database to AWS, and helps you choose the method that is best for your business.

December 2014

This whitepaper focuses on common issues raised by Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers about security best practices for human genomic data and controlled access datasets, such as those from National Institutes of Health (NIH) repositories like Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Our intention is to provide you with helpful guidance that you can use to address common privacy and security requirements. However, we caution you not to rely on this whitepaper as legal advice for your specific use of AWS. We strongly encourage you to obtain appropriate compliance advice about your specific data privacy and security requirements, as well as applicable laws relevant to your human research projects and datasets.

December 2014

Businesses must become increasingly agile as innovation accelerates and customer needs rapidly evolve. Time to market is key, so IT departments need to be agile to facilitate overall business goals. The evolution of DevOps helps provide and support this agility. This paper focuses on DevOps principles and practices supported on the AWS platform.

December 2014

This whitepaper is an introduction to the AWS cloud computing platform. It discusses the advantages of cloud computing, the fundamentals of AWS and provides an overview of the AWS services.

December 2014

AWS provides a comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying Oracle Database on the AWS cloud infrastructure. AWS offers the flexibility to run Oracle Database on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), the managed database service in the cloud, as well as on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Oracle Database performance relies heavily on the performance of the storage subsystem, but storage performance always comes at a price. This whitepaper will help you determine the input/output operations per second (IOPS) needed by the storage system of your database for best performance at optimal cost.

December 2014

AWS provides a comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying enterprise applications in a highly secure, reliable, available, and cost-effective manner. The AWS cloud is an excellent platform to run business-critical Oracle workloads in a very efficient way. In this whitepaper, we discuss the operating system choices that are best suited for running Oracle workloads on AWS. The target audience includes enterprise architects, database administrators, IT managers, and developers who want to migrate Oracle workloads to AWS.

December 2014

This paper provides high-level concepts of how you can simplify your current backup and recovery environment in the enterprise. It provides details of how you can leverage the on-demand nature of the cloud and automate your backup and recovery processes so they are not only less complex and lightweight but also easy to manage and maintain.

November 2014

AWS provides a comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying Oracle Database on the AWS cloud infrastructure. You can use the inherent qualities of the AWS cloud, such as its instant provisioning, scalability, elasticity, and geographic footprint, to architect a highly resilient and performant database environment for demanding business applications. This whitepaper provides information on how to build advanced Oracle Database architectures in the AWS cloud.

October 2014

Apache Storm developers can use Amazon Kinesis to quickly and cost effectively build real-time analytics dashboards and applications that can continuously process very high volumes of streaming data, such as clickstream log files and machine-generated data.

October 2014

In the event of a disaster, you can quickly launch resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure business continuity. The paper highlights relevant AWS features and services that you can leverage for your DR processes and shows example scenarios on how to recover from disaster. It further provides recommendations on how you can improve your DR plan and leverage the full potential of AWS for your Disaster Recovery processes.

July 2014

Amazon VPC provides customers with several options for interconnecting their AWS virtual networks with other remote networks. This whitepaper describes several such common network connectivity options available to our customers. This includes connectivity options for integrating remote customer networks with Amazon VPC as well as interconnecting multiple Amazon VPCs into a contiguous virtual network.

One challenge that architects and developers face today is how to process large volumes of data in a timely, cost effective, and reliable manner. There are several NoSQL solutions in the market today, and choosing the right one for your use case can be difficult. This paper compares two popular NoSQL data stores, Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL cloud database service, and Apache HBase, an open-source, column-oriented, distributed big data store. Both Amazon DynamoDB and Apache HBase are available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

January 2016

This document intends to provide information to assist AWS customers with integrating AWS into their existing control framework supporting their IT environment. This document includes a basic approach to evaluating AWS controls and provides information to assist customers with integrating control environments. This document also addresses AWS-specific information around general cloud computing compliance issues.

An often overlooked benefit of migrating workloads to AWS is the ability to achieve a higher level of security, at scale, by utilizing the many governance-enabling features offered. This paper describes how you can achieve a high level of governance over your IT resources by using AWS.

This paper provides an overview of common compliance requirements related to logging and how AWS CloudTrail can be used help satisfy these requirements. It is organized by general logging domains that you may find useful from a security and operational perspective.

November 2014

This whitepaper provides an overview of the options for encrypting data at rest in AWS services. It describes these options in terms of where encryption keys are stored and how access to those keys is controlled. Both server-side and client-side encryption methods are discussed with examples of how each can be accomplished in various AWS services.

This whitepaper provides security best practices that will help you define your Information Security Management System (ISMS) and build a set of security policies and processes for your organization so you can protect your data and assets in the AWS Cloud. It also provides an overview of different security topics such as identifying, categorizing and protecting your assets on AWS, managing access to AWS resources using accounts, users and groups and suggesting ways you can secure your data, your operating systems and applications and overall infrastructure in the cloud.

October 2013

This whitepaper provides an overview of how to create and manage multiuser environments in the AWS cloud so that professors and researchers can leverage AWS for student labs, training applications, individual IT environments, and cloud computing courses.

August 2013

This whitepaper highlights the best practices of moving data to AWS, collecting, aggregating and compressing the data, and discusses common architectural patterns for setting up and configuring Amazon EMR clusters for faster processing. We also discuss several performance and cost optimization techniques so you can process and analyze massive amounts of data at high throughput and low cost in a reliable manner.

October 2015

This paper is targeted at AWS customers’ internal compliance teams and their external auditors and who are evaluating or auditing the use of AWS for an internal review or external audit. It provides a checklist to help design and execute a security assessment of an organization’s use of AWS, which may be required by industry or regulatory standards. This paper builds on top of the Operational Checklist Whitepaper that provides operational and architectural guidance to help assess their application's operational readiness

June 2013

This paper is targeted at developers and architects who are looking for operational and architectural guidance from AWS to help assess their application's operational readiness. It provides two checklists - Basic and Enterprise - so that you can evaluate your applications against a list of essential and recommended best practices and deploy them with confidence.

January 2013

Customers may wish to migrate AWS Resources from one region to another for a variety of reasons. In particular, if a new region is available closer to their user base, they may wish to locate various services geographically closer to those users. This technical whitepaper is intended for experienced customers of AWS who would like to migrate existing resources to a new AWS region. The whitepaper provides technical guidance and best practices on migrating each AWS Resource such as AMI, keypairs etc. to another region.

November 2012

This whitepaper describes how AWS adds value in the various phases of the software development cycle, with specific focus on development and test. The intended audiences for this paper are project managers, developers, testers, systems architects, or anyone involved in software production activities.

September 2012

This whitepaper discusses Web application hosting solution in detail, including how each of the services can be used to create a highly available, scalable Web application.

August 2012

Do you know the true cost of running your web applications on your existing infrastructure? This whitepaper will help you understand the different cost factors involved when you deploy and manage a scalable web application in an on-premises environment and compare the total cost to a variety of different AWS purchasing options. Our analysis shows that AWS offers significant cost savings, up to 80%, compared to the equivalent on-premises deployments.

July 2015

This paper briefly outlines how companies can use Amazon Web Services to power HIPAA-compliant information processing systems.

July 2012

This whitepaper will help you understand many of the best practices involved in creating and sending high quality email from a strategy and management perspective. It identifies characteristics of high value and high quality email, it talks about the parties involved in the email sending process, and it discusses best practices for optimizing and increasing email quality.

March 2012

This whitepaper will help you understand the different cost factors involved in deploying and managing a scalable NoSQL database solution. You will learn about the TCO savings of using a NoSQL (non-relational) database cloud service such as Amazon DynamoDB over equivalent NoSQL database software that is deployed on-premises or hosted in the cloud.

October 2010

This set of whitepapers are targeted at architects and technical decision makers of enterprises looking to build a cloud migration strategy. The main whitepaper discusses a phase-driven step-by-step strategy for migrating applications to the cloud and three scenarios illustrate the step-by-step strategy for common use cases.

• Migrate Web Applications to AWS Cloud Download Scenario #1
• Migrate Batch Processing Applications to AWS Cloud Download Scenario #2
  
• Migrate Backend Processing Pipelines to AWS Cloud Download Scenario #3

December 2013

This whitepaper discusses scenarios for Amazon VPC.

October 2011

This whitepaper is ideal for those who would like to understand how to build fault-tolerant application on AWS.

March 2010

This document provides step-by-step instructions for creating a test lab demonstrating identity federation between an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory domain and an ASP.NET web application hosted on EC2 service, using Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) technology.

December 2009

This document presents a discussion of the costs of Amazon Web Services vs. traditional IT infrastructure alternatives, including comparative analysis of direct costs of ownership such as hardware costs and asset utilization, data redundancy and security, supply chain management, power and cooling efficiency, and personnel costs.

July 2008

This paper illustrates the style of building applications using services available in the Internet cloud.