Technology, Money & Questions

Amazon provides several services over web and one among them is Amazon EC2 - Elastic Cloud Computing - Infrastructure as a Service. Amazon EC2 is a web service that enables you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon's data centers using APIs or available tools and utilities.

Using Amazon EC2 you can deploy hundreds of servers within minutes and you can also reduce your number of servers as easily without any hassles. And the best part is, you will have to pay for only what you actually use. Yes, Amazon charges these services on hourly basis. The main advantage in choosing Amazon EC2 is its support for instance types of various configurations. You get machines with configurations as small as a PC to a machine which can host a heavy database server. Also, you can enable security restrictions as per your requirements.

With Amazon EC2, you no more have to put endless hours of chewing enormous amount of data to figure out your peak usage. Also, you are relieved from investing a huge chunk of your capital investment in provisioning the hardware infrastructure. You are now at the door step of an enormous transformation in the computing world. You can provision hundreds and thousands of servers in no time during your peak hours. Also, you can just get rid of those extra additional servers when you are no more in need of them.

Moreover, you get complete control your virtual PCs in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Once you create your instance in Amazon EC2, it is certainly like your pretty plain old traditional host. You will given root access to it via SSH on Unix based machines or Remote Desktop for Windows machines.

Most important, the Amazon EC2 is built on top of a highly reliable environment. Also, you can distribute your instances over various availability zones in order to keep your service up. In this case, the failure in an availability region will not affect other regions. Individual regions are well engineered to be insulated from other failures.

You have a variety of instance types to chose from. Different platforms configured with multiple vendor products. Everything at a very cheap price. No matter what, Amazon EC2 will be boon for small and medium sized players in the information industry. They surely need not worry about the capital investment needed to build their hardware infrastructure when Amazon EC2 can provide the world class infrastructure at very affordable price.

Amazon EC2 allows you to configure your security firewalls as you need them to be via web services. All your transactions and data transfers between your EC2 instance and the cloud are encrypted. Your machine in the Amazon cloud can't be anymore endangered than when it was physically present in your organization. And when it comes to vendor durability and reliability of service, the ability to survive depends totally upon the monetory base of the vendor. I do not see any reason to worry with a big player like Amazon.

Verdict: Amazon EC2 is a real good deal.

Cloud computing is the next big thing in the information industry. The term cloud computing has very quickly grown from a little known buzz word into one of the hottest topics of the information industry. In June 2009, a study conducted by VersionOne found that 41% senior IT professionals actually don't know what cloud computing means and two-thirds of senior financial professionals are confused by the very young technology, highlighting the nature of the technology.

I should say, I'm quite a bit attracted towards cloud computing. The concept of cloud computing is very promising and it really seems to be the next big thing. So, I've decided to dedicate a chunk of my blogging time to write articles on cloud computing. You will see more of cloud computing when compared to other streams.

Today lets talk about what cloud computing really is.

According to me, cloud computing as a jargon is very new to the information industry whereas the concept behind cloud computing is always present here. In its raw form cloud computing can be understood as a way of "Abstraction", abstraction of resources, infrastructure, platform.

This perception of abstraction isn't new to us, we've abstraction through out the network via the TCP/IP concept. We never cared about where or how the data flow via the internet, the TCP/IP abstraction took care of that. So, I would say that TCP/IP abstraction is the first kind of cloud we've around networking. Second, the WWW [World Wide Web] provides a clean and clear abstraction over documents. Now, we're ready to take the abstraction to the next level thus connecting billions of people and their resources together via clouds.

What does the emerging clouds primarily abstract?

The emerging clouds abstracts infrastructure complexities of servers, applications, data and heterogeneous platforms.

What is cloud computing anyway?

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm based on the use of shared IT resources, dynamically allocated to specific users and tasks and accessed as a service via an application programming interface (API). Cloud computing enables convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources [the resource may be networks, servers, storage, applications, and services], along with rapid provisioning capability. The resources can also be released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Cloud computing, works on the internet platform and uses central remote servers to maintain data and host applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation on their physical machines. Users deploy applications to the cloud, which acts like a virtual data center. The physical cloud resources may reside in a number of locations, the details of which are not typically known to the service's users. Cloud resources are provided on an as-needed basis, and delivered by IP-based connectivity.

This is just an overview of what cloud computing means. We've lots of ground to cover. Let's dig more about cloud computing in my forth coming articles.