An Introduction to Cloud Computing

In this presentation, recorded at a recent Amazon Web Services User Group meeting (organized by Skills Matter), Nicola Cardace gives a generic introduction to cloud computing and Amazon Web Services. Cloud computing should not be seen as a magical tool that can solve complex problems that prevent applications from scaling gracefully.

Cloud services can roughly be classified as Infrastructure services, Platform services, Software services and cloud software. A mind map that categorises cloud players into 5 clusters is demonstrated. Next, different products for infrastructure services, payments & billing services, on-demand workforce, alexa web services and Amazon Fulfillment & Associates are explained.

Another subject is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service that provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a simple web service interface allows obtaining and configuring capacity with minimal friction. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing quick scaling, both up and down, as computing requirements change.

The Elasticfox Plugin, SimpleDB Functionality, the Simple Queue Service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, S3Fox Organiser, CloudBerry Explorer, AWS Management Console are among the other subjects explained by Nicola. More information about AWS can be found here . The cloud computing map can be found here . Download the slides here