Amazon EC2

The book I read to research this post was Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This is quite a big book and covers the subject in a lot of depth. If you are a developer you can subcontract space on EC2 and Amazon will pay you commission. There is an EC2 data center on each continent obviously apart from antarctica. The asian one is in singapore and the european one is in ireland. To use EC2 you must have your own operating system if it is windows it should be server 2003 or 2008. You can use unix or linux. If you use windows you access your drive space via remote access if you use linux or unix it is via SSH or secure shell. You obviously need a computer with a dvd drive to install the software on your server space which is done via the internet. Many developers use the software development kits in PHP, Java & .Net but Amazon also have a repository of scripts donated by benevolent programmers some of which are in other computer languages. You can upgrade your server space without having to shut down any online programs. I may rent some server space off Amazon when MS Server 2012 comes out because normally I would build a server and in my job as a network engineer I would have to learn how to use it but I think it's better to use EC2. Some businesses use EC2 services from more than one server farm which you can do and then if one goes down they not stranded. The different server farms on different continents charge different rates.  Probably the biggest benefit of cloud computing is the cost of upgrading your computer equipment is deferred. If you are interested in cloud computing have a look at my post on that subject at
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