Building A Social Application on the Cloud

As I do more and more research about the Cloud Area Network, I’ve also found that people (technical and non-technical) still don’t get a clear grasp of how and why we should build applications that run on the cloud.

I thought the best way to explain the concept was by building a simple application that would use infrastructure as well as logic that would demonstrate the approach and the benefits of a cloud app.

The learning process took me into territory I had not visited before. It made me think differently on how to store and retrieve data. It also gave me a glimpse of how infinitely scalable these applications can be.

I am writing this in a logical breathing point in the application’s development. But it is far from being done. If it does take off, there’s some more work I need to do to make it a better user experience and enable better ways to find content within the data.

But, right now, the application is up and running. People are looking at it and interacting with it.

I will show you how what I did, so you can get a helpful road map to building a social application on the cloud.

This post will be divided in five parts. As I complete them, they will be hyperlinked below:

1. Why build it on the cloud?
2. Amazon EC2
3. Amazon SimpleDB
4. Facebook Connect
5. Next steps

Photo by luc legay

Tagged as: applications, social