Leveraging the cloud with Amazon Web Services

Amazon's S3 and EC2 offerings are publicly available services that enable you to run virtual machines and store (and retrieve) digital assets (i.e. images, music, documents, etc). In this session, we'll cover the ins and outs of S3 & EC2 and see first hand how to leverage them for various purposes – either personal or in the enterprise.

Amazon's EC2 offering is less of a development platform per se and more of a generic infrastructure service that hosts virtual machines (which can be Linux or Windows based) on which you can run anything you'd like. EC2 isn't free, but it's a lot more flexible than Google App Engine. You can run any Java application (including one that uses Hibernate, for example) provided you can create or borrow a virtual machine. As with Google App Engine, with EC2 the notion of where an application is deployed and how it will scale is largely in Amazon's control, so scaling it to a global audience is quite efficient.

Amazon's S3 offering (which stands for Simple Storage Service) is a publicly available service that enables you to store (and retrieve) digital assets (i.e. images, music, documents, etc). From an end users perspective, S3 is essentially a storage area network (or SAN), the reality, however, is that Amazon is the cloud, in which there are a number of machines (spread across a geographic area) all containing a particular digital asset (or piece of it, perhaps!). The complexity of fulfilling a service request to store your asset and indeed to retrieve it is all handled by Amazon as well. What's more, Amazon hides this complexity behind an intuitive RESTful API, which means your can programmatically access your assets from any platform or language!

In this session, we'll cover the ins and outs of S3 and see first hand how to leverage it for various purposes – either personal or in the enterprise. What's more, Amazon's S3 forms the backbone for a number of other cloud services; consequently, a firm handle of S3 will undoubtedly come in handy as you pursue other cloud offerings from Amazon's EC2 to Google's AppEngine.

About Andrew Glover

Andrew is the Engineering Manager for Netflix's Delivery Engineering Team. He and his team are building the next generation Continuous Delivery platform that is facilitating Netflix's rapid global expansion. Before joining Netflix, he served as the CTO of App47, where he lead the development of a SaaS Mobile Application Management platform. Andrew is also the co-author of Addison Wesley's “Continuous Integration” and he actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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