Amazon continues to change the game…
I’ve been continually looking at Amazon’s S3 service as a means to provide cheap, reliable storage for personal use (archiving) but have been wondering how other folks have been using it for their business. Seems many companies are finding S3 to be an honest-to-goodness alternative for backing data up instead of the run-of-the-mill terabyte hard disk setups found in so many places. (It’s lots of hardware, lots of human resources - and I’ve seen how bad of a problem big storage units can be first hand and it’s not pretty…S3 looks great simply because you’re no longer the one babysitting.)
But now, there’s this - EC2.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Basically, you can create a virtual machine in their computing environment for you to use as you need and on-demand. Think virtual hosting (e.g. Linode) - but on steriods - it’s the on-demand aspect that’s interesting - not only that - but the cost can’t be beat.
Here’s an interesting run through of setting up an image. I would *love* to see the man behind the curtain on this one, how they are accomplishing this feat and what’s the strategy for ensuring high-reliability while keeping a commitment to low pricing.
Why would we really need a dedicated server anymore? And why couldn’t we provide reliable hosting to our customers on our terms (and not through some third-party hosting entity who’s either oversold or doesn’t have the features to stack up)? I’m certain someone is trying this out right now and we’ll be seeing the results here shortly somewhere on a blog near you. I can’t wait for this thing to come out of it’s current limited beta…
Brilliant!