Amazon Web Services

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Web Services For Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

Amazon is the biggest cloud service provider in the world. It's also one of the cheapest and the author quoted another provider provided a similiar service for 8 times the price of what Amazon were charging. Also Amazon itemize your bill so you know exactly what you are paying for which again is something many providers don't do. AWS begin with them offering Simple Storage Service later abbreviated to S3 in the days before cloud computing existed. It allowed you to store upto 5 GB per file which nowadays is much more and you paid according to how much storage you used. Nowadays there are more than 25 separate service offered and new ones coming online every few months. It used to be if you had a computer you upgraded it roughly every 2 years so as to keep within the system requirements to keep software compatible with your computer. With cloud computing the provider has to provide the heavy duty hardware to run the cloud  service so you can upgrade your computers less frequently. Also usually when software is offered as a cloud product it's offered at a cheaper price than if if it was on cd rom or dvd rom. However you pay a monthly subscription. I really enjoyed reading this book particularly because it explain what a lot of the AWS individual products did in understandable terms.