Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta

Well, this is pretty amazing:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta

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.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Amazon EC2 Functionality

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.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use our pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple.
• Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed.
• Pay for the instance hours and bandwidth that you actually consume.

It's a virtual machine, delivered as a service, completely integrated with their S3 storage service; a virtual server solution that's competitive with other low-end offerings. The trick here is that other virtual server providers tend to be much smaller companies -- this allows anyone to run their apps on Amazon.com's infrastructure. In that sense, it's much more analogous to a collocated server (like you would get from Rackmount.com), in which case it's an absolute bargain.

So, let's recap what Amazon.com has done here: commercialized their expertise in high-availability infrastructure management by letting people run Linux-based virtual appliances for a simple utility fee. They've made compute and storage utility services for a certain class of application. This won't be a way for a Global 200 company to run SAP, for example, but it would allow any SMB to run a custom application built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, perl/PHP) stack.

Amazon.com Web Services are taking on the cast of an operating system.