* Allows companies to bring application to the market quickly and deployed within a limited budget
:'''e.g. NASDAQ Market Replay application uses Amazon's S3 cloud for data storage but the application part is not running in cloud presently. It has plans to develop future applications in Amazon's EC2.'''
==Cloud computing in online photo sharing==
Cloud computing advantages like scalability, reduced hardware costs and extensive reach is being utilized by some leading photo sharing websites.
===SmugMug===
* SmugMug is a premium photo sharing web site with an emphasis on professional photography.
* Members are allowed to upload unlimited number of photos, create new functionality, tagging and uploading from Picasa, iPhoto and other software packages.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmugMug Source: Wikipedia]
* SmugMug is using Amazon S3 mainly as a storage solution for customers’ photos which can be accessed anywhere, anytime while also providing real-time backup and failover systems.<BR>
The architecture basically consists of three software components:
[[Image:Smugmug-architecture.jpg|center|500px|thumb|[http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/ Source: blogs.smugmug.com]]]
===TweetPhoto===
TweetPhoto is a free photo-sharing service that compliments the social-media service Twitter which is utilizing Rackspace Hosting’s cloud-computing unit '''Mosso''' and allowing users to easily upload as many photos as they want and automatically share them with Twitter followers and Facebook friends. It also allow users to conduct photo searchers, subscribe to RSS media feeds, geotagging from GPS-enabled smartphones or transfer bio and friend information from Twitter as well as monitor which other users are viewing and commenting on their photos.
[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2009/04/27/daily29.html Source: www.bizjournals.com]
TweetPhoto utilizes the '''''Cloud Site''''' and '''''Cloud File''''' services from Rackspace.
* Cloud Site is a scalable platform which can store and recall countless amount of metadata in real-time and has the ability to run Windows or Linux applications across hundreds of servers.
* Cloud File Provides unlimited online storage for media which is served out via Limelight Networks' Content Delivery Network '''(CDN)'''
* CDN is a system of computers networked together on the internet and works on the principle that the capacity sum of strategically placed servers can be higher than the network backbone capacity. Strategically placed edge servers
:* Decrease the load on interconnects, public peers, private peers and backbones
:* Free up capacity
:* Lower delivery costs
:* Offloads traffic from peer link and redirects traffic to edge servers
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosso_(cloud_computing) Source:Wikipedia],[http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081119005337&newsLang=en businesswire.com], [http://blog.mosso.com/category/infrastructure/ blog.mosso.com]
===Flickr===
Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository.
The flickr architecture is shown below:
[[Image:flickr.jpg|center|thumb|500px|[http://www.iamcal.com/talks/ Source:www.iamcal.com]]]
The platform for Flickr is as follows:
* PHP
* MySQL
* Shards
* Memcached for a caching layer.
* Squid in reverse-proxy for html and images.
* Smarty for templating
* Perl
* PEAR for XML and Email parsing
* ImageMagick, for image processing
* Java, for the node service
* Apache
* SystemImager for deployment
* Ganglia for distributed system monitoring
* Subcon stores essential system configuration files in a subversion repository for easy deployment to machines in a cluster.
* Cvsup for distributing and updating collections of files across a network.
[http://highscalability.com/flickr-architecture Source:highscalability.com]