Cloud computing

Have you heard about cloud computing? Probably yes, but you thought it was very complicated and only available to large companies? Wrong! Cloud computing is ideal for small projects, especially start-ups that have the potential to develop but at the beginning do not have the appropriate budget.



Amazon, the company famous for the largest online store in the world, based on its huge base of hardware and knowledge, provides cloud solutions for everyone. The service, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows us to host applications in any programming language and with any configuration we need. Amazon puts at our disposal the EC2 service, which gives us full access to resources of a dedicated server with root privileges. So we can install any operating system and configure it freely. We don't have to rest at a single server. The potential of cloud computing is scalability. We can run any number of server instances with the same or a different configuration. Amazon puts in our hands the tools for automatic starting and stopping instances, depending on current traffic or load.



Undoubtedly the most popular AWS service is however S3 (Simple Storage Service). This service allows us to store any number of files in the cloud. The only limitation of this service is a file size of up to 5 TB. Such a high limit can be taken to be a lack of limits by which S3 is great for bloggers, graphic designers, webmasters and really anyone on the Internet. The service can even be used as a backup disk with a copy of your most important files or your entire operating system.



You may wonder, where's the catch? Nowhere, but the service is not for free. The bottom line is, however, that we pay only for what we actually use. So we pay for every second of the exact use of the server rather than in advance for the whole year as is the case in most hosting companies. At S3 we also pay only for the amount of space used and generated traffic. For more information, refer to AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/