Very good starting point:
[url]http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/[/url]

There are plenty of software for Linux that deal with S3. One tool that we use on a daily basis in our company is called JungleDisk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/
It adds a mount point in your file system and from there its just a matter of copying files to it.

Hope this helps.

EC2 can save a big company a lot of money. However, there are some minimum costs per month, perhaps around $80/month. In fact, in the long run, using the cloud EC2 will likely cost more money. That's because EC2 is not software, it's a web service that uses Amazon's computers that you pay to use. In the long run, someone has to pay for the computers and for the maintenance and administration.

On the other hand, using a service like EC2 can make good business sense if your needs are quite variable. You need to do research knowing what the needs of your company include.

There are lots of good uses for EC2. Some researchers are using EC2 to perform calculations, making it a kind of supercomputer. Other companies use EC2 to distribute their website around the world, making it faster to access because the EC2 server can be closer to the user. Big companies look at figures like $80/month and realize that it is really cheap. But on the other hand, if your company is smaller, you may want to just buy a few servers and hire some systems admins instead of paying a monthly fee to Amazon.

As just a base starting point, I would suggest you head on over to AWS, grab an account, and start playing with the dashboard.

After the first time you generate a machine and ssh into it, you'll be hooked for good

Hi,

I can back up discussion of costs having recently migrated an integration project with a thrid party to EC2.

Its great from a flexibility standpoint, as there are no immediate CAPEX costs.

Initially, in house it was believed to be competitive to running an internal server estate, but in fact if you want any where near the same levels of redundancy, you need to double up on everything and run the same configuration in multiple availability zones. Also if you want to make sure that you will never be denied resource you have to pay an annual up-front cost to reserve each instance that you require to have running as your base install.