blog

After Sun, HP, IBM, et al., have had a (vastly unsuccessful?) go at the concept of utility computing, it is now Amazon�??s turn with its latest announcement of EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud (Limited Beta). What is EC2? It �??is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.�?�

Amazon�??s utility computing concept relies on its other service, the S3 - Simple Storage Service, to provide storage while EC2 adds the elasticity layer on top. You store all your stuff in S3 and use EC2 to serve the stuff to the world (that really is a technical explanation :)).

EC2 is an on-demand service so you can require and boot up new server instances in minutes or so Amazon says. This would be handy for any organization that sees extreme ups and downs in its traffic. Amazon�??s pricing seems very competitive ($0.10 per instance-hour consumed, $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., internet traffic), storage costs are extra).

The question now is whether EC2 is the tipping point for the utility computing concept to catch on. Your guess is as good as mine, but I am sure Sun, HP, and IBM are watching this one closely.

For more information:

1. Review of Sun�??s grid concept and Amazon�??s EC2: http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=206
2. Step by step guide to get EC2 setup: http://overstimulate.com/articles/2006/08/24/amazon-does-it-again.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.