Amazon EC2
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 9:03 AM
Last week, Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a limited Beta service. I read a few blogs which mentioned the launch, and they seemed pretty excited about the whole thing, but so far I haven't seen the definitive explanation of why it's exciting, or who it's for.
As far as I can tell, it's a virtual server service to complement S3. So, instead of hosting your own servers or paying for dedicated hosting, you can upload a server image to Amazon's service, and pay for your processing by the hour. That's where my understanding ends. Exactly who, how, and why are still a mystery to me.
Don't get me wrong, I do feel a general sense of excitement and surprise about this service, but it's kind of vague. If you've read any good articles about it, or if you understand it and want to write one, please send me a link. I'm specifically interested in hearing how, if at all, this might relate to the Micro ISV space (I'm looking at you, Bob, you had plenty to say about S3 ;)). If I don't find a bitesized, spoon-fed explanation by the weekend I'll try to get out and do my own research...
Update: The first link is in, Walter has a blog category for EC2, and started it rolling by configuring an application on a virtual server.
Update 2: Max Ischenko directs us to Maluke's EC2 summary. That makes it pretty clear, and quite frankly it sounds like an awesome game-changer... Any more?
3 Comments:
Gavin,
I've been playing around with EC2 and to be honest the penny didn't drop until a day after I'd created an instance and installed PXN8 on it.
EC2 is a server provisioning API. What this means is that you can *programatically* add new servers to your system as your load increases. There is no human intervention involved. You can create a new server instance triggered by some condition (like say cpu usage hitting 90%) and if your webapp is parallelizable it can avail of the new server in a matter of minutes (it took about a minute to get a new instance running once I'd called the command line tool).
Each instance has fast access to S3 storage so I'm guessing (though I haven't tried it) you can mount S3 ala NFS on each instance.
I've written about installing PXN8 on EC2 here... http://sxoop.wordpress.com
Great, thanks Walter.
http://www.maluke.com/blog/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2
(from a collegue of mine)
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