Cloud computing Comparisons: EC2, Mosso and Gogrid

The idea of using the Internet to provide IT capabilities as a service is relatively new, but recently people have reached a climax in their attention. Infoq has also published several articles, such as "Introduction to Virtualization" and an article on virtualization security, but there is still a lack of comparisons between different cloud providers. This article compares three cloud computing providers, which provide a server-centric solution, starting with a description of how to start three cloud computing services and then comparing the performance, price, and availability of services to three service providers.

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Cloud computing Definition

When people come into contact with a new technology, it is easy to overlook the basic level of understanding at first, and then tend to go back and learn these things again. In order to avoid this misunderstanding, it is necessary to first give a simple definition of cloud computing. The definition of Wikipedia is:

"Cloud computing is a computing style that delivers it-related capabilities as a service." Because of the use of Internet technology, cloud computing outside the number of users is generally very large. While users are enjoying the service, they may not have any knowledge or expertise about the technology infrastructure that supports the cloud, and of course they don't need to be able to control it.

The resources visited are generally provided and operated by Third-party providers, and the providers often have a solid base of data processing centers. Cloud users purchase computing power on demand, and they are generally not particularly concerned about the underlying technology that completes server capacity growth. But for developers who are very concerned about the underlying technology, cloud computing also offers a growing number of options for platform services.

This is generally the case, although some providers also provide low-level control functions, but most of the idea is to make the cloud as simple as possible.

Why cloud computing is applied

There are a number of reasons why individuals or business groups need cloud computing, including:

Cost-connection costs are getting lower and hardware extensions are becoming more efficient

Management costs-reduce costs and save space without purchasing and maintaining actual hardware equipment

Reliability-scale scaling and compression become very easy to provide customers with more reliable services

These are just a few of the reasons the cloud is a viable option, but one thing is for sure, choosing which cloud service is not a hassle.

Service Introduction

Amazon EC2

Amazon's official website describes its services as follows:

Amazon's flexible Computing cloud (Amazon elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) is a Web service that provides variable-size computing capabilities in the cloud. This cloud is designed to make it easier for developers to make web-scoped computations.

Amazon EC2 's Web service interface is simple, and you can get and configure computing power without much effort. You will be able to fully control the computing resources and run them in Amazon's time-tested computing environment. The time it takes to get and start Amazon EC2 new server instances has been reduced to minutes, and you can quickly adjust your computing capacity when computing capacity changes, whether it becomes larger or smaller. Amazon EC2 has changed computational economics so that you can pay for your computing power on demand. Developers can leverage the Amazon EC2 architecture to have disaster-recovery capabilities and remove them from many common disasters.

Amazon recommends using Amazon EC2 first to build Linux environments, familiarize yourself with Web services, install SSH clients and Java 5 (or newer versions). At the end of this brief introduction, you'll get a link to the Amazon EC2 document that has detailed instructions for this.

First, you must create three related Amazon accounts, which are Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, Amazon simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) accounts and Amazon EC2 accounts. But after you set up your AWS account, the other two accounts are built with just a few clicks of the mouse.

After the account is established, the next step is to set up command-line tools. You can use the command-line tools or APIs provided by Amazon EC2 to manage your cloud. The command-line tool is packaged into a zip file (click to download) and can be used directly after decompression, although several environment variables (ec2_home, Ec2_private_key, and Ec2_cert) must be set up before.

When Setup and configuration are complete, the next step is to start the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). You can use the command line to create your own image, or you can see some of the images that Amazon exposes. After you select an image, you need to generate an SSH keypair to log on to this image instance. If you are using putty, you will also need to convert your personal key to a putty format, where you can find the specific approach.

The command for the boot image is "ec2-run-instances", and then the image will go into the "run" state, and the status check can be made with the "ec2-describe-instances" command. Before you access the image, make sure that the required ports are open. To use SSH and HTTP, you can use the "ec2-authorize" tool to open ports 22 and 80, respectively.

You can verify that the operation is correct by simply accessing the site's URL in the browser (the address is given after the "ec2-run-instances" command is executed, for example, ec2-67-202-51-223.compute-1.amazonaws.com). After the basic setup and Setup is complete, you can deploy the content and use your new cloud smoothly.

See the Amazon EC2 Technical documentation site for a number of more detailed guidance information. Next we'll go on the installation and setup method for Gogrid.