Programming Amazon Web Services

Chapter 1. Infrastructure in the Cloud

The World Wide Web has grown quickly over the last couple of decades to become an invaluable resource for communication, research, and entertainment. The Web has also become an open platform on which powerful services and applications can be built by established companies and newcomers alike. It is a very accessible platform that allows even small companies to create web applications and build a business without requiring the backing of a large enterprise. A person or group with some expertise, some time, and a good enough idea can create a web application that competes with the offerings of larger corporations—or even carves out an entirely new market. On the Web, the size and marketing clout of a large corporation does not guarantee it a monopoly on the attention and patronage of a global audience.

The Web is full of opportunities for companies both large and small, but the smaller companies face a difficult problem: infrastructure.

Web applications that are popular and have thousands of users require significant infrastructure to provide the high performance and smooth experience that users demand. Industrial-strength infrastructure is very expensive to buy and maintain, so smaller companies with fewer users are often forced to do without. Yet in today’s world of web publicity flash storms caused by sites such as Slashdot and Digg, the difference between a web application serving a few dozen users and serving thousands may be no more than ...