Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) continue to impress. Just annouced is the limited beta test of their newest service - Elastic Compute Cloud, allowing extremely cheap, on-demand, (somewhat) scalable computing. Cost is $0.10 per instance-hour plus $0.20 per gig external transfer, as well as a charge to store your virtual machines’ images on Amazon S3 ($0.15 per gig).
Each instance provides a “1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.”
I’ve been a user of their S3 (simple storage service) and am extremely impressed by the speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of their web services. It will be interesting to see new products and technologies making use of this commodity grid storage and computing now available to everyone.
Posted by Erik Fantasia
