Overview

With more services moving to the cloud, amazon make it very easy with their simple control panel and pricing structure. I managed to setup my first cloud space free in a couple of hours. http://aws.mikejonesey.co.uk/. Amazon provide cloud space free for one year with 750hours a month of online time for thier micro processor EC2 nodes. This makes it possible to test multiple nodes online at the same time so long as you don't have them online all the time. Or you can host a single node permenantly for one year free.

Possible Issues

• With large platforms and or websites with larger volumes of traffic it would be costly. This cost would need to outweigh other project costs to make it a viable option.
• The datacenter for Europe is in Ireland. This means it may not be the optimal location to store large medias. If you host large volumes of images and or videos you might want to look into hosting this portion of your content outside of AWS. I'll be benchmarking 100MB downloads from AWS in comarison with a london, and a french datacenter which should have better lines to london.

Getting Started

To get started you'll want to make sure you select the correct geographical location from the top right, before creating an EC2 instance, and a S3 instance. EC2 can be thought of as VPS, they allow for linux distros such as RHEL to be installed and configured via SSH. S3 can be though of as media storage space. It's simpley larger volumes of space that holds static content. Along with the AWS free account you'll be able to setup 100Mb of nosql database space.

With your EC2 instance initialised Amazon will provide you with a key pair. The key can be downloaded in pem format, which can be used to ssh on and install any required softwares.

Overall I think the product is simple, easy to use and would save alot of money in mantenance of a datacenter, however I'm keen to test 100MB downloads to test the latency from Ireland.