System Design on AWS

Chapter 9. AWS Compute Services

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 11th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

You love programming and spend your free time designing and creating new software applications on your personal computer. You recently created an application that converts input images to cartoon images and demoed this to your friend who happens to be a software engineer at a big tech company. The friend really liked the idea and suggested sharing the application with other people—plus it can also help you to earn some extra dollars. But how can you achieve this task? How can you make a program running on a personal computer accessible to other people? 

For this specific example, you need some mechanism that allows people to send an image to a personal computer and the personal computer returns output as a cartoon image via the internet. Here, in this scenario, the personal computer is acting as a server. A server is nothing but a computer that is running most of the time (i.e. a highly available ...