Amazon.com is quietly building an impressive stable of web services to handle every bit of your computing infrastructure. Yeah, that’s right, these aren’t tiny little consumer-oriented web services to get product information (though those exist as well). These are services to manage file storage, messaging and now computing.
Amazon’s EC2 – Elastic Cloud Service provides an on-demand computing infrastructure, accessible via an API as well as a set of command line tools. With the use of their Amazon Machine Images (AMI) you can define a set of applications and libraries that you want to make available (think of these as virtual machine images) and can start them up as needed. Amazon has a standard set of Linux-based images with MySQL, Apache etc… And to top it off you can use the S3 storage service to persist your data (subject to normal S3 fees – though the bandwidth between EC2 and S3 is free).
Pricing for EC2 is competitive, as usual – you can get the equivalent of a machine with 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s bandwidth for $72/month. Yeah, wow.
Jesse has a nice writeup about the service and you can check out these docs to learn more as well:
Think of the possibilities – an on-demand fleet of dedicated, preconfigured Rails servers with infinite storage…
All that’s left now is for Amazon to develop a relational storage service, perhaps built on top of S3 that can provide a standard SQL interface to your data. Then you will have the complete stack of services necessary to build most any application.
tags: aws, amazon web services, amazon elastic cloud, amazon ec2
