I attended a session on Amazon Web Services provided by NITLE.

Essentially Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows you to get a server on demand…and rather cheaply. You can pick from their already set up servers, or you can configure your own AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and put whatever services you would like for yourself or other potential users of the AMI. You then create instances of the machine based on the original AMI. So if I want every server I ever use to be running Red Hat have PHP, MySQL, and Apache on it, I create an AMI with that set up and then launch multiple instances of that AMI. Essentially in about 10 minutes I can have 10 servers up and running.

The drawback to EC2…when the server turns off or “crashes” you loose everything..this is where S3 (Simple Storage Service) comes into play. You can back up your information and data to S3 so that in the event something happens its all just sitting there…waiting to be moved to another instance of the AMI you originally set up.

This actually brings me to the idea of social networking via…servers. So let’s say I decided to create an AMI that is optimized for Moodle and make the AMI publicly available (you have the ability to make AMIs public or private), I can then share with other schools the knowledge that if you use this AMI, then you already have a working Moodle server ready to go. Pretty neat.

Even better, let’s say that I want to see how an institution set up their instance of Moodle, or I want to pilot Moodle, I can actually take a snapshot of Moodle out of the S3 (with their permission of course) and play around with it on my own server. Essentially…instant development server…instant pilot server…instant whatever you want server.

Of course all of this is pay for play…Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. But its relatively cheap and they give you a lovely little calculator (AWS Simple Monthly Calculator) so you can see how much in charges you’ll wrack up.