The Cloud

With all this jabber about The Cloud these days, just what is The Cloud? In my view the cloud is the consumer market version of services like Amazon Web Services, the service I use and often mention here. Amazon Web Services or AWS created the first mass scale virtual computing environment that they appropriately named EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud. Many of the various cloud services are now being provided by third party "middlemen" that provide added-value. In this case added-value means user-friendly, something AWS is not because using AWS requires a good level of technical expertise. The advantage of using AWS directly is cost savings along with flexibility and access to new features as soon as they become available. With all these great advantages, why wouldn't someone use cloud services? Lack of bandwidth is one big area of concern. I have a FIOS 20M/20M connection so performance is excellent when I connect to EC2 services from home. Remember upstream bandwidth is also important here, and remember that your Internet connection is independent of the cloud services connection to the Internet. I am running all my websites on EC2 virtual servers and they have fantastic bandwidth to the Internet in its entirety, independent of any local connection I may have.