Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

// October 12th, 2006 // Technology

I had heard of the Amazon Cloud in passing a few times so finally took the time to investigate it myself.

What it is:

“Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.”

It’s Amazon’s iteration of the virtual computing hosting model and is part of their broader Web Services offering.

What’s compelling is their pricing model:

  • Pay only for what you use.
  • $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

While I haven’t comparison shopped alternative vendors in this space, my rough calculations tell me that the $180 server I’m paying for with my current ISP would cost around $86 in EC2.

The other big advantage is it allows you to scale up or down as your capacity demands, and do it in minutes rather than days or weeks in the traditional box-in-a-rack model.

The downside is: 1.) it’s in BETA, 2.) there’s a waiting list.

But I’m on the list and I can’t wait to take it for a test drive!

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