>>I am setting up a site in Amazon Web Services to sell our VFP application as SAAS following on the footsteps of several developers that I met at South West Fox.
>>
>>It is not a web site but an arrangement in the cloud to run a VFP app in virtual machines to which users connect to using remote desktop.
>>
>>This is what we are setting up:
>>- A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) to tie it all together
>>- An EFS (Elastic File System) as file server
>>- An Active Directory to control user rights
>>- A number of EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances in which our customers will run our application
>>
>>We also plan to install a Remote Desktop Connection gateway so users can be given a single IP address to connect to our site, followed by a load balancer that will assign an available EC2 instance to the user.
>>Naturally we also need to provide good security, fail over arrangements and good backups.
>>
>>There are *many* things that need to be setup and configured but it isn't a completely foreign process. I'm sharing the experience in case it may help someone else.
>
>Thanks for sharing
>
>I also looked up various infrastructures in the last two years. I have done a lot of work into a VDC to set up a full dedicated network, from the firewall, to VMs, DNS, SQL Server, Web site, etc. I have also verified a lot of things into Azure and now AWS. The most important thing for me, in regards to such setup, is the ability to benefit of zero-maintenance hardware as well as direct licensing setup. Then, comes the insurance of having specific power so other clients in the cloud won't affect others infrastructure. I would be very interested to here about AWS, from your results, as to know if you are able to control your own firewall and if other clients can affect your infrastructure, mostly in regards to IOPS

As someone explained to me, Amazon doesn't sell bread ready for the oven. It sells flour, salt, yeast etc. and you make the bread and then bake it. It is a good description.

The downside is that you need to pay attention to many things that Windows normally hides, such as a NAT instances. "You can use a network address translation (NAT) instance in a public subnet in your VPC to enable instances in the private subnet to initiate outbound IPv4 traffic to the Internet or other AWS services, but prevent the instances from receiving inbound traffic initiated by someone on the Internet." On the other hand, if you choose to do it in house it means building costly infrastructure, which is one more thing that can go wrong.

Alex