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

cloud computing

[User 956]

Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?

It was already here.

10 or 25 man instance?

[UberHoser]

"new instance types". AWESOME ! Finally some sweet sweet pally loot drops !

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.

Re:Amazing stuff

[Applekid]

can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these? Yep, I think they call it a hurricane.

So that's who owns the Storm virus.

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

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

$126,934.34

[clarkkent09]

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

You seem to know a lot about this stuff

[megaditto]

Can you confirm that these two are not related?

Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale
Amazon EC2 Open To All

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 ) 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.