Amazon Web Services

Monday night at the Phoenix Ruby Users Group meeting, James Britt talked about Amazon Web Services, showed how he is using Ruby with Amazon's Simple Storage (S3), and discussed the basics of Elastic Cloud
Computing (EC2).

For me, this was the first time Amazon Web Services were fully explained to me. I was vaguely aware that Amazon had set up some web services, but I hadn't looked into it. James did a great job of explaining it and I'm sure I won't get it all right but here's my understanding. Amazon has a tons and tons of servers they use to run their core business (selling stuff). There's a lot of unused storage space and processing power in their data center so they went about finding a way to sell it. S3 is where you can store things. EC2 is where you can process things. The cool part is they work together and both are affordable / competitively priced.

There's huge potential for this business and I'm anxious to find out more about how people are using it. I could see how beneficial it could be for quality assurance. The ability to create multiple environments in EC2 and run them when you want. Since you only get charged when you run them, you don't have all the cost of purchasing your own hardware. It could also be helpful if your website suddenly gets insanely popular and you need additional hosting. You can add processing as you need it then take it away when you don't any longer.

While I'm probably not going to use Amazon Web Services in my current endeavors, it will definitely be something to keep my eye on for the future.

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