Hosting in Amazon Cloud

Cloud Computing is for every person for every day

Cloud Computing opens new opportunities both for business and for any person solving their particular tasks. The current series of articles has a goal to show that any person can use almost unlimited resources exactly for the price of using these resources. I don’t need Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport to get the nearest supermarket or even the work (although I wish I drove such car to my work several times), so I have a car a bit simpler. Of course I cannot make such Grand Sport from my car for a couple of hours, and pay for these hours only. But I can use Cloud resources for a couple of hours and pay for these hours only.

Let’s come back to the earth. I have a small project. The project is to make a site. There is no problem to create a site in Visual Studio. It’s been required – it’s done. Then it’s time to upload and show to a customer.

– Where is your hosting, Mr. Customer?

– …

– Is it going to be ready to the release time?! But the release time is a time for a release version, not for beta!

So I need a hosting for a very short period…. What could I do?! – I’m asking pensively and looking in the window. There is a cloud in the window. Of course! It solves the problem!

I don’t think my case is extra-ordinary. Below there is a set of simple steps to solve such task by means of Amazon EC2.

Get a site ready. It’s assumed I have a site ready. I use a demo page “Hello Cloud” here (why don’t really say hello to the Cloud?).
Use a tool. I use EC2Studio add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. I find convenient to have the development and deployment environments in one place. If you don’t have it yet, you can download it from the site www.ec2studio.com. It’s free. The installation is very simple. Only path is necessary there.
When add-in is installed EC2Studio functionality is it’s available under “Tools” menu item of main menu in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Get Cloud Credentials. As you probably understand I use the Amazon Cloud. If you don’t sign up there, you can do it on the site http://aws.amazon.com. Once you sign up you can use it immediately. Set the Credentials in EC2Studio To use the tool the credentials (AWS Account Number, AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Key) should be defined during the first start or in the Options (Tools menu again).