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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?"
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.