Cloud Computing and Its Application to Amazon

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that he had to create more than just a bookstore if he wanted people to come back as customers. Therefore, he added the option for buyers to write their own book reviews, which is a huge credit and success to Amazon.com. People began to see Amazon as more of an online society and not just a place to buy things. By 1997, Amazon.com had made $15.7 million in revenue. When the company went public the same year, they decided to add more options to the website such as CDs and movies. In 1998, Amazon added some new items: electronics, software, toys, video games, and home improvement items. As the company started showing signs of success, people became a skeptic, doubters, argued that Amazon was earning too much in a very short time.

How cloud computing is useful to Amazon

Amazon is an online store that is used worldwide. With them being based in the US and with customers all around the world, it would be extremely difficult for them to carry out their operations without cloud computing. Among the cloud computing services used by Amazon include;

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) "Compute":

It is a web service which offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is also designed in a way that helps the developers to make a web scale computing. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is very easy and simple web service that lets the customers obtain and configure capacity with least friction. EC2 lets the customers have a complete control of their computing resources and allows them to run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

It also allows customers only to pay for the capacity that they actually use; that’s why the economics of computing change. Furthermore, it gives the developers the tools to build strong failure applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Amazon EC2 has many powerful features for building scalable, failure resilient, enterprise-class applications, such as:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store: it provides block level storage volumes for the use of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS is highly available, highly reliable storage capacities that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and shown as a device within the instance.

• Multiple Locations: Amazon EC2 offers the ability to move instances to any multiple locations. The locations of Amazon EC2 are composed of regions and availability zones which are different locations that are engineered to avoid failures in other availability zones.

2. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) "payment and billing":

It is the first payments service designed for developers. It is built on Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment network and provides developers with an easy way to charge Amazon’s customers with permission (Spector, 2002). Amazon customers can pay using the log-in credentials, shipping address and payment information they already have on file with Amazon.

3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) "storage":

It is storage for the internet which helps the developers to make web-scale computing in an easy way. Amazon S3 delivers simple web services that can be used anywhere at any time to store and retrieve data on the web. It allows the developers’ access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive framework Amazon uses to manage its global network of websites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

4. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) "Messaging":

It is a simple web service that provides to developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective ability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It can be used to create topics that the customer wants to inform other customers of, subscribe customers to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered to clients’ protocol of choice such as HTTP, email.

References

Antonopoulos, N., & Gillam, L. (2010). Cloud computing: Principles, systems, and applications. London: Springer.

Erl, T., Puttini, R., & Mahmood, Z. (2013). Cloud computing: Concepts, technology, & architecture.

Jamsa, K. (2013). Cloud computing: SaaS et al. virtualization, business models, mobile, security and more. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Reeser, C. (2011). How to issue a Kindle book with Amazon.com: Everything you need to know explained simply. Ocala, Fla: Atlantic Pub. Group.

Spector, R. (2002). Amazon.com: Get big fast. New York: HarperBusiness.