A closer look at Amazon's EC2 and S3 services

5th Oct 2016

Amazon has officially made its mark on the world of cloud computing with its landmark EC2 and S3 services. These developments are arguably the most significant to occur in recent years with regards to consumer cloud computing; through them Amazon is looking to corner the SaaS (software as a service) market (with EC2) as well as the cloud driven entertainment experience (with S3).

What exactly do these services offer consumers or businesses?

Both EC2 and S3 are opening doors for people; EC2 is a complete virtual computing solution with near unlimited power at its disposal and S3 is arguably the ultimate system for archiving and accessing your musical entertainment. And of course, the full range of possibilities for each of these splendid services has not been fully explored yet by consumers.

EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud

Imagine being able to access an entirely different computer (with its own resources, RAM, storage, software, apps, processor etc‚Ä¶) via the net. Since this computer is accessed via the net, you are essentially taking it with you everywhere you go; all you need is an internet connection. Amazon's EC2 is essentially a complete solution for individuals or businesses seeking a SaaS-style service. EC2 is basically an access point to a virtualized computer with an almost unlimited amount of additional resources at its disposal.

What does this mean for the businesses that apt to use EC2? For businesses, EC2 is a way to break into the world of cloud computing in a cheap, safe, flexible and extremely powerful way. Through EC2 businesses can leverage the extreme power of multitudes of servers all at a comparatively low cost (just imagine trying to set up, maintain and purchase all the necessary components to build a comparable network; it would be in the 'millions upon millions of dollars range'). EC2 gives nearly any company or individual the ability to access extremely advanced computational resources at an extremely affordable cost.

SaaS or Software as a Service

For those that are unfamiliar with what SaaS stands for, here is a quick summary. SaaS is a level / type of service offered by a cloud computing provider, which in this case is Amazon. In the SaaS model, the provider gives their client all of the resources needed to make cloud computing possible; this includes interface apps / programs / method, virtualized hardware, storage, security, runtime, and of course network access. Clients are essentially only paying for access to these resources and are not responsible for any kind of setup, maintenance or configuration.

S3 or Simple Storage Service

The idea behind Amazon's S3 service is giving people the ability to take their entire music collection with them wherever they go. But instead of simply miniaturizing some storage device or inventing a new type of physical storage medium, S3 utilizes the power of the internet to give consumers the power to create an ongoing database for their entire musical / sound based media collection. S3 is pretty much the music delivery service that we've all been dreaming about; and it's one that will most likely replace all other models. Currently it is a freely available service (at 5GB, by purchasing an album of MP3's from Amazon they provide a free account upgrade to 20GB) that also allows users to upload mp3's from their current collection (that were not purchased from Amazon.com).

The implications of these services (to the world of cloud computing and computer networking in general) is far reaching. If they continue to grow in popularity, it may signal a 'changing of the guard' so to speak, in the way that individuals and businesses do both their networking and computing (not to mention access their entertainment).

We invite you to check out the Cloud Computing Certification Page for more learning opportunities around the management of Cloud Computing environments.