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?"

Comments

Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[Hatta]

I dunno, what is it?

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[decipher_saint]

Marketing lingo for Web Service hosting...

Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

[inKubus]

You can actually install any operating system or applications. It's basically a virtual server but you pay hourly rates. So if you do some heavy computing once a month, you can just lease time on a server and not have to buy a server, rack, ups, network gear, etc. They store your image and data for you, up to 1.7TB. It's actually a pretty good idea.

Re:Beware of the shortfalls

[Conficio]

Not sure if I miss the point. Which Joe Blow has knowledge of hwo to build an efficient multi server app with an unusual largely unknown storage back end S2? My point is that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are seeking a standard like environment. Why are mySQL and postgres so popular? Why are WAMP/LAMP, Ruby on Rails and cakePHP the basis for so many apps? Because 99,9% of Joe Blows get it and can handle its complexities. But a database is not feasable on an Amazon cloud. Because when the slice dies, you do have lost its content (database/file system) and you don't even have the ability to look at the logs, what might have caused the death of it. so anything dynamic, like Wiki, Blog, E-Commerce, needs special very calculated measures to backup this kind of information. I argue this kind of knowledge is not so wide spread and might lure folks into trying something and then loosing everything in the event of their system going down. Also, the lack of a static IP is an issue, for reasons from the need of dynDNS or similar to search engines frwoning on an IP address changing from time to time. I agree that cloud computing has promisses in terms of cheap, on demand computing that can scale hardware resources quickly without sinking money into advanced purchases. However, this requires a lot of architectural planning on the part of the software design. In my experience, when you need scaling of an app, the hardware costs are the least of the burden. The rearchitecture of the application software is the bottleneck.