Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service

RebornData writes "I receieved an e-mail this morning inviting me to participate in a limited beta of Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It's a grid computing service that allows you to create and upload your own Linux-based machine images and run them in Amazon's system, starting at $.10 per "instance hour" (each machine instance being equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM, and 160GB disk). You can use their tools to create and start new instances dynamically to meet whatever your particular capacity needs are at any given moment. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are explicitly supported, but any distro based on the 2.6 kernel should work. The service documentation provides more technical details. Unfortunately, it appears that the beta is limited to existing Amazon S3 users, and is already full."

Comments

Burstable Servers

[peterdaly]

At $.10 per hour, that makes a single server instance about $72 per month. If you have minimal storage needs, it can compete with a low end leased server, plus it has other advantages not present in the physical leased box world.

Personally I don't have any need for a scalable system such as this, but it certainly opens the possibility for products or projects that may not otherwise be feasible.

Have a CPU intensive batch job that can broken up and distributed? Use these boxes during the run then eliminate them when it's done. Only pay for the time you use.

At a previous job I had a task that would have been perfect for a burst-able cloud like this. Example:

Every evening we had a large number of scanned tiff images that needed to be manipulated, and a short time window in which to do it. Tiff image manipulation takes a lot of CPU resources and time. We ended up purchasing a bunch of blade servers that sat idle for the 22 hours a day they we not running images. Something like what Amazon is offering may have been a very high performance and cost effective solution to that type of problem. The control via web services could automate the whole process.

I use Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could I buy some server time to get my initial compile to under a week?

Elastic Grid computing?

[dontbflat]

what? So they are building computers for you and letting you use them for whatever you desire? Hmm. 0.10/hr thats $2.40/day. Thats $876/year. Not a bad deal. Heck its even cheaper than some website services that give you a dedicated server for $200/month.

Re:Who uses this stuff?

[OverlordQ]

Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

No, what if you need to do a one-off job. Which is cheaper $.10/hour or paying somebody full time, buying supplies, paying for labor to put it together, paying for power to run it, and then letting it sit there gathering dust.

There's no way you can get parts for the systems and labor for an admin to ~$72/month/server

Re:You're the grid computing poster child

[ispeters]

The downside, aside from the 100% solvable issue of being able to wake up 1,000 computers in the middle of the night without needing a staff of 80 (which was what it took for our "successful" run), is that programming for a grid is hard and tedious, and none of the frameworks that I am familiar with really take it down to the level where it needs to be for "regular" programmers to be able to do it.

You might want to check out Starfish. It's Google's MapReduce implemented in Ruby, kind of. It makes distributed grid computing possible in six lines of code. Unbelievable, but true.

Ian

PS I've personally got nothing to do with Starfish. I read the author's blog--that's it.