This document discusses using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to build a cloud computing infrastructure. It provides an overview of cloud computing and AWS services like EC2, S3, EBS, ELB, SimpleDB, RDS, Route 53 and CloudWatch. It discusses why to use cloud computing to reduce costs, simplify management and improve scalability. It also covers how to set up an AWS account, launch EC2 instances, configure storage, and best practices around standardization, testing and availability. Finally, it discusses tools for managing cloud resources and an approach using base AMIs, Puppet for configuration, and ZenOSS for monitoring.