the user. A service often
companies.
99
Chapter 3 Managing digital
business infrastructure
Figure 3.8
Salesforce.com
Source: www.salesforce.com.
Figure 3.9
Server room at Google’s Summa Mill data centre
Source: Connie Zhou/Google, AlamyCelebrity / Alamy.
Examples of cloud computing web services
Think of examples of web services that you or businesses use, and you will soon see how
important they are for both personal and business applications. Examples include:
●
web mail readers;
●
e-commerce account and purchasing management facilities such as Amazon.com;
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Part 1 Introduction
●
many services from Google such as Google Maps, GMail, Picasa and Google Analytics;
●
customer relationship management applications from Salesforce.com and Siebel/Oracle;
●
supply chain management solutions from SAP and Oracle;
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social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr
and LinkedIn.
From the point of view of managing IT infrastructure these changes are dramatic, since
traditionally companies have employed their own information systems support staff to man-
age different types of business applications such as email. Costs associated with upgrad-
ing and configuring new software on users’ client computers and servers are dramatically
decreased.
As seen in Mini case study 3.5, many smaller businesses and start- ups use cloud comput-
ing services to provide web- based services at a relatively low cost with the flexibility to meet
short- term ( high- demand spikes) or longer growth in demand for their services.
Mini Case Study 3.5
View the examples at Amazon Web Services (AWS) (http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies) to gain
an idea of the services used by start-up businesses. Here are some examples:
●
Application hosting: 99designs’ massive design marketplace has received over 3.1 million unique design
submissions from over 53,000 designers around the world and runs entirely on AWS.
●
Back-up and storage: ElephantDrive turns to Amazon S3 to store client data, expanding their total amount
of storage by nearly 20% each week while avoiding increased capital expenses.
●
Content delivery: HyperStratus teams with the Silicon Valley Education Foundation to support AWS cloud-
based content management serving 13,000 teachers in the Silicon Valley area.
●
E-commerce: The Talk Market uses Amazon Flexible Payments Service to power its credit card processing
pipeline.
●
ERP: Singapore- based Electra is an IT service provider specialising in implementing and running SAP
systems for customers across Southeast Asia. Electra uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide cus-
tomers with a flexible, highly available SAP cloud environment that costs 22% less than on-premises
infrastructure.
●
High- performance computing: Harvard’s Laboratory for Personalized Medicine (LPM) uses customised
Oracle AMIs on Amazon EC2 to run genetic testing models and simulations.
●
News: Social news site reddit, based in San Francisco, provides an online platform, reddit.com, to post
and vote on content. By running on AWS, reddit can scale its platform to support 4 billion page views per
month, and was able to quickly double server capacity in minutes for President Obama’s live Q& A session
in 2012.
●
On-demand workforce: Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Channel Intelligence was able to leverage human
intelligence around the globe and decrease task- specific costs by 85%.
●
Media streaming: Netflix, a leading online subscription service for watching movies and TV programs, has
grown its streaming video business to millions of users globally. By using AWS, Netflix can quickly deploy
thousands of servers and terabytes of storage within minutes.
●
Social media: HootSuite is a Web and social media dashboard that helps users spread messages, organise
conversations, and track results across multiple social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Social updates from 2 million users are reliably and securely transmitted around the world by utilising
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.
●
Web hosting: Online mobile commerce provider Gumiyo runs a complete production environment with
Amazon Web Services, including web servers, database servers and load balancers.
Amazon Web Services supports start- ups through their growth
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