Examining Amazon’s Public Elastic Compute Cloud
Currently, the most high-profile IaaS service provider is Amazon Web Services with its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon didn’t start out with a vision to build a big infrastructure services business. Instead, the company built a massive infrastructure to support its own retail business and discovered that its resources were underused. Instead of allowing this asset to sit idle, Amazon decided to leverage this resource while adding to the bottom line. A funny thing happened after this relatively modest plan was put in place: Customers began to find that it could mushroom into something big.
Fast-forward a few years: Today, Amazon has established itself as the gorilla in the market. Amazon’s EC2 service was launched in August 2006 and has evolved since with added enhanced features.
Amazon offers the following services to its customers today:
Compute power: Customers can rent enough compute power to run or develop their own applications.
A web services interface: Through this interface, customers can create virtual machines that meet their requirements for CPU power, memory, and storage space.
Control over the virtual operating ...
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