Amazon’s EC2 is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a while – If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss.
EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth.
This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting – allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees.
I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the ‘launch’ problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks.
I can’t help thinking that Amazons naming is a bit bland or too clever – Mechanical Turk, EC2, S3.
Perhaps they should buy anywhere.com off me for EC2.
Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services