While self-hosting on a cloud, you may choose one of the cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCE. They provide compute resources, networking capabilities, virtual private clouds, and much more, to get control over your servers. Using a cloud provider as opposed to running on your own hardware comes with the following advantages:

• No upfront investment in hardware
• Ability to upgrade/downgrade servers
• Ability to add or remove servers as and when needed

It is typical to not be sure how much CPU, RAM, and so on, is required for your nodes when you start. Choosing the cloud gives the flexibility to benchmark on one type of configuration and then upgrade/downgrade or add/remove nodes as needed without incurring upfront costs. We will take EC2 as an example and try to understand the considerations to take into account. Most of the considerations should remain similar for other cloud providers as well. The following are some of the aspects to consider on AWS EC2:

• Choosing instance type
• Changing the ports; do not expose ports!
• Proxy requests
• Binding HTTP to local addresses
• Installing EC2 discovery plugin

• Installing S3 repository plugin
• Setting up periodic snapshots

Let's focus on them one by one.