Your options of choosing cloud instance (Virtual Machine)

As you venture into the cloud, you have a few options of all the yadada: “SAAS / PAAS / AAAS / DAAS….Private, Public…”

Here we summarise it in 3 categories:

• Private Cloud (For in house use / Accounts / Sensitive Data)
• Public Cloud (For general use / Website / Webservices)
• Hybrid Cloud (Web management of inhouse stocks)

For a general web application or site service, lets focus on a public use of cloud, which is currently dominated by RackspaceCloud and Amazon.

Option A: Setting up a cloud account at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon web services provides a range of web enabled services. Of which the one we should focus on is Amazon EC2. It is essentially a black naked box (nothing installed), allowing us to set it up as we wish. Amazon ( aws.amazon.com/ )

Option B: Setting up a cloud account at Rackspacecloud

RackSpaceCloud ( www.rackspacecloud.com ) is a major player of cloud enabled web service. It has partnered with NASA to provide one of the largest open source cloud technology OpenStack.

At Rackspacecloud website, select order a new account and the product “Cloud Server”. Follow the instructions to get an account, username and password. Once you get an account, you will need to follow the given instructions at the site and create an instance of the webserver.

 Option C: Setting up your own Virtual Instance on Private Cloud

I will not be stating too much on this however you will be able to get more information from googling OPENSTACK or DEVSTACK or OPENNEBULA