There is a lot of talk about cloud computing these days - but what is it really? Well put simply, cloud computing is sharing resources (like computer processing power, software etc) as a service through a network such as the internet i.e. instead of everything happening on your local PC or server, you get it provided as a service through the internet.
Within cloud computing there are also sub-areas - for example, just like you have storage in your PC or server, cloud storage is a network of online storage spaces. Data is stored virtually and this is usually hosted by third party companies. An example the virtual storage service is the Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. It is an online storage service designed for developers, to make web-scale computing easier. Amazon S3 offers a very simple interface where developers can store and retrieve data anytime through the internet. You can write, read, and delete objects from 1 byte to 5 terabytes each. The objects can be accessed securely using a developer-assigned key. You can also choose the Region where to store the data. Only bucket owners and object owners have access to the data they stored. One of the nice things about this type of storage system is that there is no minimum fee to use Amazon S3 and you pay only for what you use. Here is the US Standard Storage Pricing for example:
| Standard Storage | Reduced Redundancy Storage | |
| First 1 TB / month | $0.140 per GB | $0.093 per GB |
| Next 49 TB / month | $0.125 per GB | $0.083 per GB |
| Next 450 TB / month | $0.110 per GB | $0.073 per GB |
| Next 500 TB / month | $0.095 per GB | $0.063 per GB |
| Next 4000 TB / month | $0.080 per GB | $0.053 per GB |
| Over 5000 TB / month | $0.055 per GB | $0.037 per GB |
You can check your estimated monthly bill for various regions through the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.
To get started with Amazon S3, you just have to create a "Bucket" where you will be storing your data. You may choose a specific Region to store your bucket and objects to optimize latency, minimize costs, or to address regulatory requirements (the latter being particularly relevant to government agencies or highly regulated industries). Available regions are US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), GovCloud (US) Regions, EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo). Upload data to your Bucket and you can set access controls if you want to. You can also give access to other users. Amazon S3 can be used to store and distribute content, store data for analysis, and back up, archive, and recover data.
Here at Wirth Consulting, we have used Amazon S3 to store customer's website data for example - in particular for custom social networks where you effectively create your own social network - with similar functionality to Facebook but in which you own and control the resulting data and it is hosted on your infrastructure. In this respect it is highly cost efficient if you want to allow your custom social network users to store potentially large volumes of data like photos and videos as part of their account.
