Cloud Services Overview

What are Cloud Architectures?

Cloud Architectures are designs of software applications that use Internet accessible on-demand services.  

Why would you use them?

Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing.

• It is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs.
• It is difficult to get the machines when one needs them.
• It is difficult to distribute, co-ordinate and manage a large-scale job on different machines
• It is difficult to auto-scale up and down based on dynamic workloads.
• It is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done.

What do they offer?

• A robust, scalable, compute and storage platform
• Managed & supported by someone else on a utility basis
• Allows us to expand our capacity without having to worry about the provisioning of complex infrastructure.

What benefits?

• Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment
• Just-in-time infrastructure provision
• More efficient resource utilisation
• Usage based costing
• Parallelisation

How AWS can help you.

AWS have been working closely with Microsoft on their new Windows Azure Services Platform. AWS have built one of the first prototypes using Windows Azure with the RNLI. For more information on Windows Azure please contact us.