Amazon Cloud Computing
An Overview of Amazon
Seattle-based Amazon Inc. is one of the world’s largest online businesses, and is rated as the biggest online retailer in America.
The company was also one of the trailblazers in E-commerce as we know it today, having started its operations in the mid 1990s—just a short time before the first real dot com boom.
Over the years, Amazon has grown into a huge International operation, with revenue figures hovering around the US$10 Billion mark in recent years.
Although the company started and gained popularity as a goods store selling a wide range of product lines, Amazon soon diversified into service provision.
One of its service provision subsidiaries is Amazon Web Services – the company responsible for its cloud computing service, which is known as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud—or simply Amazon Cloud Computing, as it is known as to enthusiasts—is one of the services offered by Amazon Inc. through its web services provision arm, Amazon Web Services.
It is a service that allows users get to rent ‘virtual machines’ (essentially server space) from Amazon, which they can use to run their own software applications.
In Amazon cloud computing, you only have to pay for the hours in which you actually use the virtual machine instead of a fixed monthly fee.
As a computer user and a business owner, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud’s approach gives you at least four ways in which you can save on costs.
First, the approach allows you to save money that you otherwise would spend by ordering (and, perhaps even more expensively, shipping) your own servers direct from a manufacturer.
Second, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud allows you to save money that you otherwise would spend paying for idle server time because, with this service, you only pay for ‘active server hours’—hours in which you actively use the system’s ‘virtual machine.’
Third, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud allows you to save precious time that you otherwise would lose during in-house server downtimes—as, in most cases, this service offers you considerably more uptime then you would be able to achieve in-house. (Probably due to its scale.)
Fourth, because of its scalable nature, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud allows you to save money that you otherwise would spend expanding your server space as your business grows.
The beauty of Amazon cloud computing is that it will accommodate you no matter what operating system you are using. This is an exciting development because, for the first few years of its existence, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud was only compatible with Linux and OpenSlaris, before becoming compatible with Microsoft’s Windows operating system sometime in 2008.
The Future of Amazon Cloud Computing
According to Amazon Web Services, there are still many more additions in the works for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
The company is still adding new features to its service, a good example of this being its recent addition of persistent storage volumes.
Persistent storage volumes give the user more control in terms of storage – making them suitable places for storing almost anything, including databases.
The volumes are referred to as persistent because they are made to survive the end of a cloud computing session, allowing you to access previous work in the next session—just as you left it.
Before the advent of these persistent storage volumes, users running applications that needed a more permanent kind of storage had to make do with the systems Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3.
While these services served their purpose, they had a small drawback in that that the stored files couldn’t be seamlessly accessed by the application that needed them, which is the problem that persistent storage volumes solve.
Meanwhile, more and more businesses are discovering Amazon cloud computing and opting for it, rather than running in-house application servers.
With the numbers of people signing up for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, it seems that it is a service whose time has arrived.
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Category: Amazon
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