Forum Moderators: phranque
I assumed that this was intended for solving big scientific problems, etc. and would require learning a proprietary environment, writing software to conform to some API that takes some input, does processing, and returns the result. Somehow, I envisioned it as a commercial version of the SETI screen saver...
It certainly didn't look like something of interest to webmasters.
I happened across some comments on EC2 today which made me go "hmmm..." (It was an article about my email service provider using EC2 to run some nightly maintainence tasks) and so I decided to look at the EC2 documentation.
Bascially, what EC2 does is allows you to run a virtual machine - with a 1.7mHz processer, 1.8GB of RAM, and 160GB of disk - typically running a Linux version. The virtual machine is "on the net" and can interact with the Internet in the usual ways.
You create an "image" of the environment using tools that Amazon provides. They provided pre-built standard images. (Fedora Core 3 & 4, etc.) You pay for only the time the image runs, at a rate of .10/hour. (You also pay for storage, which resides on Amazon's storage cloud, as well as network I/O. I/O to Amazon's storage cloud is free.)
That rate makes it highly competitive with low-end dedicated server costs - except that what you get is considerably more than the typical low-end dedicated server provides, and you can rent it by the hour (or less) rather than having to pay to have it sit there whether you use it or not.
Basically, what you wind-up with is a virtual server that you can start-up and stop at will, paying only for the time that it is running. Or many of them, that do the same or different things.
Bells started ringing...
Ideas on how this might be used by webmasters:
- Extra server(s) during peak daily periods or "slashdottings" (however, one issue right now is that they do not offer static IP addresses)
- Long daily or weekly batch-processing jobs that drag down your server
- Email list handling
- Spidering (price-comparison sites, etc.)
-?
I'm posting this for two reasons: to see if anyone here is using EC2, and, if so, for what purposes?
And, secondly, to clarify the nature of EC2 for those of you who were either not aware of it, or had the same misconception that I had.
