The Cloud: Taking Back Control of Your Data World

I remember when the Internet took off. It was such fun, and where we would set up our own email servers, DNS services, FTP server, and so on. But over the years these services have blended into the background. But, now you can take back control, and centralise your data world. While companies have generally moved to the Cloud, individuals can create their own data world, and take back control. For me, I want to script everything and automate how my data is used. In this way, a single individual in the cloud can be as efficient as a large company.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been making the first steps towards migrating my bare-metal Web infrastructure in 1&1 to AWS. I have been paying 1&1 for five years, and my server was really struggling — with failed disk boots, and so on. So, even though their support was pretty good, I decided that I needed to take back control, and control everything about my server infrastructure. My first worry was cost, and so from over $100 per month, my costs are down to around 75% of this, but I also have backups and snapshots. Along with this, I can easily scale the servers up and down as the demand requires.

I soon found that a core thing to save money is to reduce the size of a volume, as it costs $0.10 per month per GB. So my 500GB disk was soon mirrored down to 250GB (and might go down even more…