EC2

I’m really intrigued about the possibilities provided to small or new business by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Basically, the EC2 allows developers to create a pool of virtual machine images, that can be scaled up or down in minutes. The EC2 integrates with other Amazon web service offerings, like S3. The package seems like the ultimate service oriented architecture.

I’ve always been impressed by Amazon’s web site and infrastructure. When you think about all the information (products, reviews, users, wish lists, recommendations, orders, etc.) on this web site, it’s amazing it works and scales as well as it does. I look at the EC2 as Amazon allowing the rest of use to leverage the expertise they’ve gained developing and designing large, scalable systems. Thanks!

For companies, this technology allows a very cost effective way to test new business ideas with the safety of scalability should the idea take off. I’m having a hard time finding a down side to using this service.

Discussion

Anyone have any comments on using this service, a potential downside, or competing services?

More Info

Amazon EC2
Amazon Web Services

Comments

Unknown said…
Utility/Elastic/*On Demand* computing really does open up a lot of possibilities. (On Demand *'d because so many people are talking about On Demand these day's and delivering something far inferior).

Some of the key areas we see are:

Lower costs due to easy scalability (both upwards and downwards)
Massively reduced startup costs
Higher SLA's through redundancy
No long term contracts or large CapEx investment.

(Disclaimer, We have just released our utility computing platform in the UK www.flexiscale.com for more info).

Tony.
May 14, 2007 at 7:04 PM
Vinnie said…
Thanks for the info! It's nice to know there are choices.
May 15, 2007 at 8:38 AM
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