When we set out to create www.miljöparkering.se, we wanted it to be a win situation from the very start. That is, even if the site wouldn’t ever gain significant user adoption, our goal was to at least make it a personal win.

One of the things that both Björn and I had wanted to break into was cloud computing. We wanted to gain experience in hosting a web service in the cloud. We also wanted to control and maintain the entire stack of the web service, from web server to database server, to background services.

The inspiration for using Amazon’s cloud services (or, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to be exact) came from talking to Lars Krantz and Thomas Mårtensson, the guys behind www.malmofestivalen.se. During our communication while I was creating the Android application, I got a lot of input on how they did things on the site and got to know their thoughts on how to maintain and scale the site. And as you might have noticed the last two years, that site has run perfectly with high availabilty. 

So, in preparation to developing www.miljoparkering.se I sent Lars some questions, which yielded an answer which I, at first, found rather cryptic. But basically it was just very much in line with one of the toughest parts of getting involved with Amazon’s AWS: you have to understand a huge pile of acronyms, services and entities and how they all relate to each other!

I all honesty I think Amazon AWS has a steep learning curve. Documentation is present, but is huge and overwhelming. Trying to predict costs is almost an intimidating task (although it’s gotten a lot better since the first time I looked through their pricing information some years ago). The detailed sign-up process includes identity validation through phone (very well implemented, though, technically speaking). Once you’re validated, you can log on to your personal web console, a AWS universe full of detailed information. Also, using the AWS SDK for .Net has its quirks, such as initially failing when used with log4net (caused by an unexpected side effect). 

However, for those considering to try out Amazon AWS, I do have some encouragement: True, Amazon AWS is very advanced and can be quite overwhelming. But you can ignore most of it and just focus on the part of AWS, that you initially need. For us it was EC2 (Elastic Computing) servers. After getting a server up and running, we started to look at other services, such as Elastic IP (public IP for the server, hard to get around ;-), firewall setup, and the SES, Simple Email Service, for sending out our notifications.

Although the site itself could fit easily into a normal web hotel, the Amazon server gave us the flexibility and control we needed. And over time, the cryptic mail from Lars turned out to be very useful information, once I had gotten acronyms in place (thanks Lars ;o)