This came off the top of my head recently when trying to convince a large enterprise that they should at least fiddle around with cloud, and although this is like cloud 101 for most people, I thought it was worth sharing. This post was almost called “Getting Started With Cloud”, but that was too cheesy. So what would be an easy first cloud project for an enterprise (or any kind and size of organization, really) ?
Image hosting, of course. Take the static images from an internal (intranet) website and copy them up the the cloud provider of your choice… S3, EC2 with a web server, Rackspace Cloud, ScaleUp, it doesn’t really matter for this test.
Redirect the web browsers looking for those images to the new location… on many web servers, you can do a .htaccess file with mod_rewrite to do something like this:
RewriteRule ^images/(.*)$ http://cloudproviderurl.com/mystuff/images/$1 [L]
This tells the server to give the browser an alternate address for each of the images they request from the page or site, and the browser will magically (and transparently to the user) go fetch the image from the big bad cloud. The harder way would be to just change your html, css or code to point to a new /images/ location…
In picture form, that flow looks something like this:
