Imagine you are the site operation and infrastructure manager of an Alexa.com top site and are considering using Amazon Web Services (AWS). What factors do you need to consider in determining whether to migrate to AWS? What services and instance types could you use, and how much cost could you save? You can use Alexa and site traffic information (e.g., Wikipedia provides page view stats) to estimate the amount of traffic received by a top site, or you can take concrete examples from the Web, such as the following example: http://2bits.com/sites/2bits.com/files/drupalsingle-server-2.8-million-page-views-a-day.pdf. The slides describe an Alexa #3400 site that receives 2.8 million page views per day, using a single server.
The server has two quad-core Xeon 2.5 GHz processors with 8 GB DRAM and three 15 K RPM SAS hard drives in a RAID1 configuration, and it costs about $400 per month. The site uses caching heavily, and the CPU utilization ranges from 50% to 250% (roughly 0.5–2.5 cores busy).

a. Looking at the available EC2 instances (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/= instance-types/), what instance types match or exceed the current server configuration?

b. Looking at the EC2 pricing information (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ pricing/), select the most cost-efficient EC2 instances (combinations allowed) to host the site on AWS. What is the monthly cost for EC2?

c. Now add the costs for IP address and network traffic to the equation, and suppose the site transfers 100 GB/day in and out on the Internet. What is the monthly cost for the site now?

d. AWS also offers a micro instance for free for 1 year to new customers and 15 GB bandwidth each for traffic going in and out across AWS. Based on your estimation of peak and average traffic from your department Web server, can you host it for free on AWS?

e. Based on the service characteristics, if a much larger site like Netflix.com  migrates its streaming and encoding infrastructure to AWS, what AWS services could be used by Netflix and for what purposes?

f. Look at similar offerings from other cloud providers (Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc.). How do the answers to parts (a)– (e) change?

g. “Serverless computing” allows you to build and run higher-level applications and services without thinking about specific servers. Examples include AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, etc. Continuing to wear your site operation and infrastructure manager hat, when would you consider serverless computing?