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?"

EC2 is the dogs bollocks

[slashmojo]

We've been using it for a few months now and its great.

With a single command we can export computing tasks from our main system to a customized instance at amazon and when complete, import the resulting data. All powered by a few simple bash scripts. We can fire up any number of tasks like this and massively increase our overall processing capacity whenever needed and then shut it all down when not.

So far, after several months of running multiple instances we've not had a single failure or data loss although even if an instance had died it would make little difference since we can easily just export the tasks again at any time.

There is also the handy EC2UI firefox plugin to manage your instances..
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=609&categoryID=88 [amazonwebservices.com]

Once you get the hang of EC2 you will likely come up with all sorts of computing tasks you can 'out source' from your current systems. Overall I highly recommend it.

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Competitors ? Who are the competitors ?

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[Danathar]

Yea, I should of said "theoretically" as it's obvious that Amazon does not have an unlimited amount CPU's. I'm surprised google did not come up with something like this first.