Cloud Computing Info

Choose Your Tool

When working with AWS, you have a choice of tools. You should try several tools and use the one that works best for your needs. Some tools are provided by Amazon and others are provided by third party developers. I cover seven tools in chapters that follow this one but that list is not a comprehensive list. It’s just the tools that I have used myself and that I know for a fact do work.

Some services are more programming tools that anything else. SQS is like that. It is a queuing service that you will plug into your applications.

People frequently ask me about cloud examples and success stories. Of course, the biggest success story has to be Animoto on RightScale.

On April 14, 2008, Animoto launched a Facebook plugin for their Rails application where users create music videos with photos and music of their choice. Its instant popularity forced them to scale up the number of application and worker servers at an unprecendented rate in just a few days. They were also able to easily scale down their deployment after the initial traffic spike was over.