Amazon EC2 Open To All

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just announced that the beta program for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service is now open to all developers. They have also added new instance types. It appears that you can now get the equivalent of an 8-core machine. Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?"

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[Danathar]

EC2 allows you to bring up in seconds 10 or 10,000 Xen instances or Virtual Machines of practically any LINUX type (Xen instances).

Don't compare it to a hosting service where you pay for the month. With this you could script your web site to automatically start up instances on EC2 as demand increased, doing load balancing for example and then as the demand went down you could automatically shut down virtual machines.

The cool part of this service (and there are competitors) is the ability to bring up VM's on demand for whatever either automated or manually.

Learn more if you are in Silicon Valley

[bstadil]

If you are interested join the Silicon Valley EC2 user group. Next meeting on the 24'th this month. I think there will be a speaker from Amazon AWS proper More here [meetup.com]

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

[JavaGenosse]

Been playing with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud more than one year, like its simplicity and great deal of opportunities it provides for businesses and other type of clients. Forum provides good deal of advice and useful information (see http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/forum.jspa?forumID=30 [amazonwebservices.com] ) Resource center has all kinds of tools to get you running in very short period of time, including pre-configured images of operating systems (currently only Linux), called Public AMIs. There's also some good blogs ( http://ihatecubicle.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] ), that provide help on advanced things like persistence to external services (S3, Nirvanix etc). SQS provides messaging facility with simple API, so it's easy to work with.

Beware of the shortfalls

[Conficio]

Before we all dream up our cloud nine apps, consider the current shortfalls. * No persistent storage, other than S3. That means all permanent storage has to be re-acrchitected to an S3 key/value interface. Any file/database on the virtual hard drive (160 GB) is gone, when the instance crashes, or you need an external DB server (latency) and lots of cache to make that hopefully perform. * IP address is static as long as the instance runs. When it crashes, the replacement instance gets a new IP. That means you need to run dynamic DNS front ends and do your load balancing somehere else. These two issues make it not as simple as starting a server and installing your Wordpress, bbPHP, etc. While more powerful instance types are nice, what really is needed to make this a simple to use offering is to have instance types with, identified regular file system storage (somewhere on the SAN?) and with assigned static IP addresses. For really powerful distributed content delivery, I'd also like to determine where on the globe an instance will be started, so the transport to the client can be optimized. Just my analysis of where we are.

Re:Beware of the shortfalls

[The Fred]

Since this is a well-known problem, there are of course a lot of people working on solutions. I have recently discovered S3DFS: http://www.openfount.com/blog/s3dfs-for-ec2 [openfount.com]

A FUSE-based file system that mounts like a normal filesystem but reads and writes to S3.

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well just to clarify, as a user of the EC2 service for a while, you do not have unlimited access to starting instances. The maximum number you can have running at the same time would actually be under less than 100 to start, I think default may be around 20. Though you can get it raised, it takes special circumstances. In terms of starting instances, when starting up many at once, let's say greater than 30, you will be looking at around 10 minutes to get the majority up, and probably 15 for all of them to be live.

Re:$126,934.34

[Bitmanhome]

Now compute the cost of the time wasted modding you up, despite the fact you didn't provide any links either. Ok hot stuff, here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011 [amazon.com]

I don't see any one-sentence summary, but Amazon seems to explain it pretty well. And yes, you can run Windows on it [enomaly.com].