The cloud and the HPC world
Chapter 5, Python in the Cloud, gave you a quick tour of the cloud in general and Amazon Web Services in particular. This is a hot topic nowadays, and the reason for this is simple: with relatively little upfront investment and virtually no wait, one can rent a few virtual machines together with, optionally, a database server and a data store. If the application needs more power, one can simply scale up the underlying infrastructure with the press of a button (and the swipe of a credit card).
Things, unfortunately, are never as simple as vendor brochures like to depict, especially when outsourcing a critical piece of infrastructure to a third party whose interests might not be perfectly aligned with ours.
A solid piece of advice is to always plan for the worst and keep automatic backups of the whole application and its software stack locally (or at the very least, on a separate provider). Ideally (but not that practically), one would have a scaled-down, but up...
