CLOUD STRATEGY
Getting started with Amazon EC2
Carl Brooks, Contributor
05.14.2009
Rating: -4.33- (out of 5)
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Carl Brooks
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Amazon.com's cloud computing offering, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the flagship of a fleet of new companies offering Infrastructure as a Service in the cloud computing age, and it is doubtless the model on which a great deal of new service offerings will be based.
In this article, we explore the ups and downs of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and how to get started.
Is EC2 for you?
Any business that has dynamic scalability needs based on online delivery, sales or applications is a good candidate. Startups that want to develop infrastructure with the absolute minimum of costs or IT organizations with short-term projects are also good candidates. It is less ideal for businesses with low latency requirements, large files or strict security concerns.
In short, if your business does heavy-duty transactional processing or massive relational database computing, it's not for you. But if you are developing an online service, opening an e-retail outlet or delivering content, you should check it out.
For instance, a retailer anticipating a surge in traffic or, more realistically, a steady decline, can store an image of their clustered storefront server, and bring additional servers online, responding instantly to spikes and dips in traffic. Over the holiday season, Target Corp., a broad set of shoulders in the online retailing world, did exactly that. EC2 and AWS have been credited with helping Target weather the holiday surge much better than some of its competitors whose websites buckled on Cyber Monday and other busy sales days.
AWS spares businesses the capital outlay of traditional hosting or of building a data center which requires even more up-front capital costs. The upshot is that Amazon, which be...
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