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Chapter 1. Infrastructure in the Cloud
The World Wide Web has grown quickly over the last couple of decades to become an invaluable resource for communication, research, and entertainment. The Web has also become an open platform on which powerful services and applications can be built by established companies and newcomers alike. It is a very accessible platformthat allows even small companies to create web applications and build a business without requiring the backing of a large enterprise. A person or group with some expertise, some time, and a good enough idea can create a web application that competes with the offerings of larger corporations—or even carves out an entirely new market. On the Web, the size and marketing clout of a large corporationdoes not guarantee it a monopoly on the attention and patronage of a global audience. The Web is full of opportunities for companies both large and small, but the smaller companies face a difficult problem: infrastructure. Web applications that are popular and have thousands of users require significant infrastructure to provide the high performance and smooth experience that users demand.Industrial-strength infrastructure is very expensive to buy and maintain, so smaller companies with fewer users are often forced to do without. Yet in today's world of web publicity flash storms caused by sites such as Slashdot and Digg, the difference between a web application serving a few dozen users and serving thousands may be no more than a glowing article and a few hours' time. Although this kind ofattention may be exactly what you hope for, unless you have invested heavily in infrastructure, your application may not survive the onslaught. On the other hand, if you spend too much money on servers, bandwidth, hosting, and the management of all this infrastructure, there will be little left to develop the application itself. A dilemma facing many small development teams is how to strike theright balance between investing in application development and funding robust and scalable infrastructure. Amazon offers a new and compelling solution to this dilemma in the form of infrastructure web services. These services allow application developers to avoid altogether the burden of buying and maintaining physical infrastructure by making it possible to rent virtual infrastructure instead. Inthis book we will show you how you can build your applications on top of Amazon's services and effectively outsource your infrastructure.

1.1. Amazon Web Services for Infrastructure
In this book, we will examine four offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provide flexible and affordable infrastructure components on which you can build industrial-strength web applications. Amazon SimpleStorage Service: S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers secure online storage space for any kind of data, providing an alternative to building, maintaining, and backing-up your own storage systems. It makes your data accessible to any other applications or individuals you allow from anywhere on the Web. There are no limits on how much data you can store in the service, how long you can storeit, or on how much bandwidth you can use to transfer or publish it. S3 is a scalable, distributed system that stores your information reliably across multiple

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Amazon data centers, and it is able to serve it quickly to massive audiences. Its storage application programming interface (API) isdeliberately simple and makes no assumptions about the nature of the data you are storing. This simplicity means you can maintain complete control over how your data is represented in the service. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: EC2 (beta) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) makes it possible to run multiple virtual Linux servers on demand, providing as many computers as you need to process your...