Rightly they say “The future is cloud” … and now we are seeing that everyone is using someway part or full of “Cloud Computing”. As you can find the detailed reading on Cloud Computing in another post, hence I am trying to give some more thoughts around one of the vendor service offerings on Cloud Computing from Amazon. They have bundled their cloud computing services under ‘Amazon Web Services’ (AWS).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a pioneer ‘cloud computing’ based company providing different kinds of remote computing services over the web. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage service (S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce are to name few of them. Let’s have a quick overview on what these services are all about:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):

It provides resizable computing resources, all available in the cloud. By subscribing to Elastic Compute Cloud a user can create a virtual machine (an instance), which is nothing but an outline of a machine.

You can configure the instance based on the Operating system, applications, libraries, data, security and network access, etc you want to use.

The advantages:

• Elastic: The capacity of the server instance can be increased or decreased with in no time and you have the liberty to create as many instances as you want at the same time.
• Complete Control: You will have root access of the instances and have full control over it.
• Secure and Reliable: This service runs on a highly reliable and secured computing environment. Web Service interfaces are available to configure firewall settings.
• Economical: In line with advantages of cloud computing, for EC2 also you pay for only what you use and the kind of instance you create.

The Pricing:

The pricing depends on the time of usage and the kind of instance created.  Let’s see how:

• On-Demand Instance: The pricing for this instance is based on per instance-hour consumed, starting from the time when instance is launched until it is terminated.
• Reserved Instances: Reserved Instances can be purchased for the period of 1-3 years and pay a non-refundable fee only once. You get a discount on the usage charge i.e. the rate applicable when the instance is running.
• Spot Instances: Spot instances are the unused EC2 capacity whose charge is decided on the supply of and demand for Spot Instances.

The cloud computing area is still under the evolution and the changing scenario is very dynamic, so watch out for the happenings around this. I will keep you posted on that, so keep updating!

You might also like to Read:

1. Windows Azure Platform Services
2. Windows Azure : Part 2 – Benefits