Introduction

Though explaining cloud computing is not in the scope for this book, I will explain it in just one paragraph. Any business, big or small, needs hardware infrastructure with different software installed on it. An operating system is the basic software needed along with different servers (from the software perspective) for storage, mail, web, database, DNS, and so on. The list of software frameworks/platforms that are needed would end up being large. The point of interest here is that the initial budget for this hardware and software platform is high, and so we are not even considering the real estate needed to host it. This is where cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Rackspace, Google, and Microsoft come into play. They have hosted the high-end hardware and software in different data centers across the globe and let us choose from different configurations to start an instance. This is then accessed remotely over the public network for management purposes. Literally, all...