Ahead in the Clouds

Last year through the power of Twitter I was able to take a moment of Jeff Barrs’  time from his busy schedule to chat with him about his passion ( and my interest ) Amazon Web Services.  As the Senior Evangelist for AWS Jeff  tours the world attending conferences, talks and exhibitions where he can pass on advice , thoughts and ideas about utilising AWS. Specifically sharing ideas with users and developers of the Service in order to continue to improve their offerings.

Amazon Web Services is a collection of products  which enable  developers and subsequently business to access large quantities of computing and storage power. The most interesting of these services is the Elastic Compute Cloud ( (Amazon EC2 ) – Beta ) .

Cloud computing is another of those wonderfully “fluffy” terms that the technology market likes to use to describe something that is a very simple idea.   Elastic Compute Cloud provides a “Virtual Server”  which allows the owner to adjust the performance and storage on a  on-demand basis.  I am sure many will  remember the days of mainframes and per department billing for the running of reports and applications. The concept is back only now we are on a per customer billing.  A startup can consider implementing an application written to scale from 1 to million ( or more ! ) users and only pay for the actual usage of the system  in process.

Developers can  create and scale an application without the hassle of moving servers or purchasing new machines. The ability to scale works both ways since the option to decrease as well as increase the amount of “power” required allows a developer to handle sudden jumps in demand.

In an era where people are stressing over the “Carbon Footprint” issue of web services the ability to scale the demand with the energy requirements and avoid owning machines which may be wasting energy and creating their own heat is an as yet  unrealised benefit in offering Virtualised and Scalable computing requirements to any startup.

I wonder if AWS would consider selling you the carbon credits you just saved ?

Amazon Web Services is another one of those stealth success stories. They have enabled a variety of companies to  flourish whilst they have remained in the background providing the service.

The Elastic Cloud Compute is just one of the products on offer from Amazon Web Services but you can read more about it here. Alternatively keep on eye on the AWS Blog.

If you have an experience of using AWS either professionally or privately please drop me a comment here on the Blog.

Thanks for reading.