Facebook Application Hosting (places to Host your App)

The Challenge

Facebook is among the world’s most popular social networking sites and has a rich developer platform on which you can create and share your applications with a massive and growing community of users. In selecting the Facebook platform, you gain a viral distribution capability and powerful social networking tools to offer your users valuable, shareable experiences. When selecting a cloud vendor on which to deploy your Facebook application, be sure to consider the answers to these questions:

• Can I use the programming languages and web application platform of my choice?
• Can I use the operating systems and environments on which my existing website is already deployed?
• Does the cloud provider have a track record of operating highly available and dependable web infrastructure?
• Do I have to sign up-front contracts or purchase my own hardware out of pocket?
• If my application becomes incredibly successful as a result of the viral nature of the Facebook environment, will I be able to quickly scale to meet that demand?
• How much global coverage do I receive to deploy rich media functionality?
• How will I keep up with all the user-generated content moderation that Facebook requires me to do?

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Facebook Application Hosting Using AWS

A Facebook application is, effectively, a hosted web application that utilizes the Facebook Developer API to be accessed from within the Facebook environment. Developers can host their Facebook applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to access a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective compute infrastructure. You can use the followingAWS components alone or combined to build your scalable Facebook application:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources. Learn more

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data. Learn more

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing valuable resources so that you can focus on driving distribution of your Facebook application. Learn more

Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying. You can write your applications to take advantage of Amazon SimpleDB’s simplicity and its ability to scale seamlessly. Learn more

Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute content to Facebook users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3. Learn more

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). Amazon SQS provides a high performance, secure queuing system for your Facebook application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your application’s processes. Learn more

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Benefits at a Glance

Easy to use. AWS is designed to minimize much of the heavy lifting of setting up and managing your own IT infrastructure. You don’t need to purchase and configure hardware. You can get started with AWS in minutes and take your idea and deploy it to your customers with minimal friction. And, you can use the AWS Management Console, a variety of third-party management tools, or the well-document AWS web service APIs to manage and maintain your cloud infrastructure.

Flexible. AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your Facebook application requires.

Cost-Effective. You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

Reliable. With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.

Scalable and high-performance. Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to the compute and storage resources when you need them.

Secure. AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.