written by gunther gerlach-2009
This material covers the initial set up of an entire Cloud environment at Amazon Cloud infrastructure to run any web implementation solutions. This is the quickest answer that you may find out there, so let’s stat it!
We will cover all the steps to set up an entire environment in a cloud platform, from creating an user account at Amazon Web Services to creating and customizing Virtual machines (AMI), Virtual Storage Units, Virtual backups, Elastic IP’s, etc.
For all of you that don’t understand some of the acronyms used here, let’s just to look at them before to start:
Gunther Gerlach

Basically, moving to the cloud it shouldn’t impact your architecture with many changes as we believe. If your platform has a well design architecture based on independent layers (UI, Logic, Data, etc), adapting to work in a Cloud environment only mean to add a new layer of virtual environments to your n-tiers environment. Moving to the Cloud only become a problem when solutions don’t have a solid and well designed architecture and basically they are pushed back at the moment to adapt to this new age of technology.
Gunther Gerlach
written by gunther gerlach-2009
Cloud computing can describe services being provided at any of the traditional layers from hardware to application. In practice, cloud service providers tend to offer services that can be grouped into three categories: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service. These categories group together the various layers, with some overlap.
Software as a service (SAAS)
Software as a Service features a complete application offered as a service on demand. A single instance of the software runs on the cloud and services multiple end users or client organizations.
Gunther Gerlach
written by gunther gerlach-2009
Virtual servers in the cloud model. Basically they are providing Infrastructure as a Service. If you need to run your application, you can go to their site, configure your own server with your required configuration and software libraries and they will generate a server on the fly for you! Basically all this magic has come about thanks to virtualization technologies which allow you to create software servers independent of the hardware infrastructure running them. These VMs can be scaled and migrated depending on the need.
Gunther Gerlach
Software as a Service (SaaS), also known as on-demand computing, is changing the landscape of information technology in a profound way. By replacing locally managed stacks of networking, hardware, and software resources with an Internet-based utility, this model has changed how business applications are delivered, bringing new levels of ease, adoption, and success to the challenging area of enterprise software. And just as the evolution of the Internet affects almost all industries, the evolution of the on-demand model promises to change enterprise technology and to offer new opportunities for IT productivity and impact.
Gunther Gerlach

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS clouds make it very easy and affordable to provision resources such as servers, connections, storage, and related tools necessary to build an application environment from scratch on-demand. IaaS clouds are the underlying infrastructure of PaaS and SaaS clouds. A common characteristic of IaaS clouds is that they are more complex to work with but with that complexity comes a high degree of flexibility. So, these are generally lower level services in the grand scheme of things; not in a derogatory sense of course. You’ll be dealing with virtual machines, operating systems, patches, and various other issues. You’ll likely require some specialized help to make it all work well.
Gunther Gerlach