Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3 The phrase “cloud computing” has been subjected to unnatural forms of marketing abuse. The buzzword pros have taken two nouns that we all recognize, combined them and formed a nebulous, hideous beast that means many things to many people. Vague as the general cloud computing term is, there are places where you can encounter an …
I knew this was coming and, as editor of the story, will address now to stop a flurry of comments.
As I see it, computing is often used as a noun as well. High performance computing being on example. Business computing being another.
Perhaps I have gone too far, but am sticking with it for the time being.
I recently started using S3 to backup important files from the dedicated server I administer.
I searched around for a while before deciding the most straightforward method was using some open source software called s3fs. This enables you to have an s3 account mounted as just another directory under Linux. Making backups is now as simple as copying the files to that directory. For added security I also encrypt them before copying.
I assume that, in future articles, the author will talk about the full scope of Amazon's cloud computing, but in the meantime, my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, is meowing quite discontentedly at the above comments. "Computing", regardless of what English language labels and rules apply to it, is definitely a part of the "cloud", although it's not obvious from this story, which covers only S3, the storage portion of the cloud computing services Amazon provides. You can also use EC2, the computing portion, which allows you to do pretty much anything you can do with your own systems. I don't really understand why the author even continues to use his own.
As an example of pure computing, you could create a virtual machine to calculate the digits of pi, provision one of Amazon's EC2 machines to run it, and just let it go, without storing the digits, or even serving them up to anyone. Amazon will charge you for every hour the machine is assigned to you. S3 is billed by how much data you store, and how much you transfer, in and out. EC2 is connected to S3, such that S3 stores all of your virtual machines, which are booted and executed, by EC2, only when necessary. Data transfer between S3 and EC2 is free. Basically, except maybe for backups, you can run your entire business from Amazon, which is the promise that "cloud computing" delivers, today.
Paris, because she's also clueless about the cloud.
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