Now taking virtualization a step further you as a small medium business don't have the buying capacity
of a huge company such as Wal-Mart or Target large companies spending large amounts of money can negotiate
prices that small medium businesses cannot.
And that's not only true for retailing it's also true for service companies such as Amazon Microsoft
and Google can buy hardware a lot cheaper than small medium businesses or enterprises can.
In the past Amazon was buying so much hardware but not utilizing it all the time but buying it in preparation
for the demand that they would have for sales at Amazon dot com that they started selling time on their
hardware.
And this is where cloud computing started.
Amazon allow you to leverage their physical infrastructure to run virtual machines.
Amazon isn't your only choice today we also have Microsoft Azure as well as Google Cloud.
But all of these work on a similar premise.
You can run
servers on their infrastructure at prices that are much lower than you could buy.
In other words if you wanted to run a small virtual machine you can actually run it for free on Amazon
today or you can run it at such a low price that it makes more sense to run your infrastructure in the
cloud rather than trying to buy hardware and maintained that hardware.
If you're buying servers you need to provide power cooling and other resources to maintain those servers.
So why not just run your servers in the cloud.
Amazon already have that infrastructure in place.
So do Microsoft and Google.
They are paying so much less than you for hardware such as CPE use and disk space that it makes more
sense for you to just leverage their hardware.
That's what companies such as Dropbox and many others do they have in the past or currently run on top
of Amazon.
So in other words when you store files in Dropbox those files are stored on Amazon's storage and are
processed by Amazon servers.
Dropbox has recently changed that but a lot of startups like Dropbox use Amazon to provide the infrastructure
to their businesses and the whole idea here is cost.
You can spin up virtual machines very quickly and you can pay for the demand.
So in other words if there's a spike in traffic you simply pay for the extra resources that you're using.
You don't have to try and buy physical servers get them shipped physically install them rack them power
them and so forth you can on the fly use the resources available in the cloud so in this example I'll
sign into Amazon
and what I can do here as an example is launch a virtual machine which they say will take less than
a minute.
So I could call this test 1 2 3
I can decide which operating system I want to use as an example I'll select Ubuntu click Next I'm gonna
go for a T2 micro server so I can see the amount of CPR you RAM and storage that to the server has noticed
this is going to run free click Next
I need to download a key pair to access that server but notice I can not create the instance and it's
as simple as that for me to create a server and then I can connect to that server remotely and manage
it.
Notice I didn't have to purchase any hardware I didn't have to wait for the hardware to be shipped.
I didn't have to rack the server I didn't have to power up the server I didn't have to configure a network
I didn't have to configure storage I didn't have to install an operating system I didn't have to install
applications.
Those are all immediately available to me in a matter of minutes.
It's as simple as that to start up a virtual machine on Amazon so notice in this example I've got a
virtual machine running called Test one two three.
It's currently initializing but I've also got other servers running on Amazon.
I can manage these servers remotely so I can shut them down I can power them up.
So as an example here I've got USA 1 Live Labs dot com.
So the server USA 1 Live Labs 3 dot com is actually running on an Amazon server.
I'm not told that to my test one two three surveys completed and in a moment I'll be able to connect
to that server.
But in this example I had my Live Labs server previously configured and as an example I could log in
to that live lab server and in this example I can connect to a remote lab
which is a physical switch running locally here in the UK but I'm actually connecting to this physical
switch via my Amazon virtual machine running in the USA rather than me trying to setup a physical server
like I did here and I would have to install the physical server power it up and so forth.
Then I would install the host operating system which in this case is E6 I and then I have to install
my guest operating system and install the applications on that I can simply spin up a server on Amazon
and connect to it remotely.
The server is once again running in the USA.
I'm based in the UK but that's the advantage of cloud computing.
It doesn't necessarily matter where that server is based.
It's somewhere in the cloud.
I don't know physically where that server is located.
It's somewhere in the mid-west of the USA.
I'm in the UK but I can simply connect to it like I would connect it to any other server on the Internet.
Once again that's the power of cloud computing and the cloud.
It's very quick and easy to spin up devices and leverage the infrastructure of cloud providers such
as Amazon Microsoft Azure and Google.