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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?"
I dunno, what is it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...but does it run Linux?
can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
hey, you, get off of my cloud
Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?
It was already here.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"new instance types". AWESOME ! Finally some sweet sweet pally loot drops !
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
Tonight we'll have partly cloudy code with a chance of a core dump.
It all makes perfect sense now. Amazon creates the Storm virus botnet. Then it sells computing space. Anyone who tries to compete with them is shutdown by DDSes from the botnet. Amazon ends up owning the entire internet, and leasing it out for profit with suggestions on books about being a good repressed peasant.
It's like some bizarre take on DC comic's 'Amazons Attack!', only with slightly more porn.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Today's weather forecast for the Amazon region is partly cloudy computing with occasional scattered rain showers. Don't forget to take your umbrella!
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
Help fight continental drift.
Yes.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
That is the cost to the economy of all the slashdot users having to waste a minute of their workday to google "Elastic Compute Cloud" because the editor couldn't be bothered to put one sentence in the summary. Yes, I worked it out.
Thanks kdawson
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Can you confirm that these two are not related?
Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale
Amazon EC2 Open To All
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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 ) 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/ ), 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.
One huge limiting factor in using EC2 was the lack of solid hardware for back end databases. Looks like that's no longer an issue.
Now if we could just get static IP addresses, ability the assign PTRs and persistent on disk storage we could completely do away with our data center.
Ok, IMHO, for this to be true cloud computing as I see it, it requires every dumb terminal in the country (one per person for argument's sake) to have a big fat pipe to the internet or cloud for data. The bandwidth available inside a stand alone machine can be into the multi-gigabit range for moving large amounts of data, such as for audio editors, video data etc. A 1megabit dsl line just aint gonna do it, and broadband isnt even available to all in the US yet. While I agree this is a step in the right direction, we can't have true cloud computing until we get bigger tubes!
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.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
How does this compare in cost with a roughly equivalent chunk of storm botnet?
Only if its to remain free ( for personal use ). If not, its for the elite and corporate world. Neither i would consider 'the masses'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Too bad it's probably heavily patented. We could use some "cloud computing", but hell will freeze over before we support Amazon.
Support for FreeBSD images is desperately needed before many of us would consider making the jump. The last I heard is that there is some work going on in FreeBSD 7.0 that will make it easier to run FreeBSD instances on EC2 so Amazon can start supporting it. Anyone else got a more recent update?
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
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.
And I've had an idea for another genetic program, where the input is only a few hundred bytes, the output is only a few hundred bytes, (so I/O bandwidth is a non-issue), but it takes many trillions of clock cycles to get from point A to point B. The Amazon system may be an ideal system for me.
I might balk at buying a new box, trying to find a space for it in my house, then powering it up and keeping it powered up while it runs for MANY YEARS. With this service I could do all the computation in a SINGLE DAY for not very much more money. Me like.