‘Cloud Computing’ has become almost a buzzword in the latter part of 2010 and I’m sure will remain to be throughout 2011. People are starting to adopt Cloud Computing for a range of uses – for instance, at Beyond, our spreadsheets, documents and some of our presentations are now built and or stored on Google Docs. Version control for our websites is accessible anywhere and some of our files are stored on Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3). There are several benefits to Cloud Computing – most obviously being able to access your data anywhere without being on the network where the files are stored, less risk of data loss, and being able to collaborate without constantly sending files back and forth.
As a Developer, Amazon’s Web Services (or AWS) really has grabbed my attention. The past year has been an interesting journey with AWS, after first discovering it whilst researching hosting for a web application I was writing in 2009, I now use it on a majority of our web applications and websites. Hosting is one thing that really has kept up with the changing nature of the web. Services like Heroku, Google App Engine and obviously AWS have managed to complement the web’s rapid development and allowed scalable, intuitive web apps to exist at a fraction of the cost of a couple of years ago, giving us the capability to handle the large traffic volumes we have achieved on some of our projects.
So why AWS? It must be said that the two front-runners of cloud hosting are Google App Engine and AWS. Whilst GAE is great for specific tasks it does have limitations right now, running only a choice of two programming languages, not dealing with static file hosting performance as seen on AWS, along with several other annoyances that we have found when developing on it. GAE is still only in beta though so no doubt there will be great things to come from Google.
AWS however is so feature rich I don’t think I’ll ever get around to using all of the tools! With their storage solution holding an unlimited amount of data and only paying for what you use we have found it extremely useful for several of our projects, I Breast Feed Because for one. A huge amount of video data needed to be stored and S3 proved to be the perfect solution. Attaching Amazon’s Cloudfront service to the S3 bucket allowed us to distribute the videos on a world-wide Content Delivery Network. Their load balancing tools, relational database system and auto-scaling features have allowed us to scale to traffic/user loads that were never possible before without a huge budget for hosting. AWS is still expensive though and the ‘pay for what you use’ selling point doesn’t necessarily mean that it is cheap.
Thankfully they have just opened a free tier option if you want to sink your teeth into getting to grips with AWS. You can run a free micro instance for a year which means you can have a play around getting to know the interface and I’m sure quickly realise how it right now seems like the future of all hosting. It is a great idea from Amazon to give the free tier, developers can now learn AWS without having to fork out for the server. Sign up here for it.
AWS has proved to be a great solution for hosting and supporting on demand, scalable web applications and opens up so many new possibilities for future projects.