[Swlug] Any advice on setting up a pay-per-use web service?

[Mark Summerfield]

Hi,

I am thinking of setting up a pay-per-use web service.

I'm expecting it will work something like this:

- Someone uploads their data & chooses their options
- They click 'compute' and the site calculates the price and presents a
  payment method
- If the payment is made the site sends a request to a Windows virtual
  machine provided by a cloud service to do the work (run a command line
  tool on the user's data) and return the result data
- The user is shown the result data and maybe emailed a unique download
  link valid for 7 days or so

Does anyone have experience of setting up something like this?

It seems that Amazon, Google, & Microsoft all offer Windows VMs and
ecommerce solutions.

But which would be easiest to use to set up the whole thing?

I did look at Azure earlier this year but their compute costs seem v.
high and my service will be quite CPU-demanding.

Thanks,
-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd.
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