Almost Exclusive: Amazon Readies Utility Computing Service

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1. Mark Devlin
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:10 am

   Um, are you sure that’s the correct Fedora link?

2. Edwin Ong
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:10 am

   The service is pretty easy to set up - I was able to get a server up and running in a few minutes. Screenshots at: http://www.castblog.com/index......c2-review/

   Re: Nik’s comment on per server performance, I imagine it wouldn’t be long before Amazon or other developers distribute server images with built-in clustering software. Then the advantages of EC2 would be obvious as startups create cost-effective mini google-scale clusters: $7200/month for a cluster of 100 machines.

3. NeoTechie
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:15 am

   Power to the people. The net will continue to revolutionize the way we do business. Web 2.0 is just getting started. It is bigger, better and stronger the web 1.0. I hope that everyone has something to offer this revolution.

   /*

   Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
   –Tim Berners-Lee—

   */

4. Jeremy Wright
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:15 am

   Holy @#$@… We were about to move to Rackspace mainly for uptime support. I’d imagine this would just never go down as well (in spite of Amazon.com’s recent downtime, S3 stayedup). We provision servers at 10GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth, so we’d only pay about 180$/server, give or take.

   That’s what we pay now at a medium-tier provider.

   Definitely sent an email to the tech team. Thanks for the heads up on this Nik!

5. Noah Winecof
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:36 am

   Hmm my verdict is still out on this service.

6. Pete Cashmore
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 6:37 am

   Great post, Nik, although you gotta be careful when claiming exclusives: Chris Pirillo posted at 3am, and I’m sure there were others before him.

   http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/.....cloud-ec2/

7. Bernie Thompson
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 8:32 am

   This kind of scalable computing resource is especially interesting to those creating small web services which may or may not take off. You have a bunch of things converging here — many new, small sites are getting done with frameworks like Ruby on Rails. These fameworks attack the problem of lowering initial development cost, while EC2 lowers initial hosting cost. Result? Much lower barriers to experiementation and market entry.

8. exclusive??
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 8:35 am

   Pirillo had it…

9. Nathan Ostgard
   

   August 24th, 2006 at 8:42 am

   I love this. Between this and S3, Amazon is moving up on my dreamy companies list.

   I would gladly use this for new projects as opposed to renting a dedicated server. Even if you couldn’t get as much power out of the individual machines, the combined power of all the servers you could get with your dollar is pretty attractive.

10. Nik Cubrilovic
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    Yow! Fedora link updated, don’t know what I was thinking there. Thanks Mark

    Pete: I started writing this post long ago when it was an exclusive, I hope Mike doesn’t notice I was late updated the headline anyway

    As for server images with built-in clustering, that might just work.. but there is a lot more to running and maintaining an application that spans more than just a single server. I think a truly elastic computing solution would allow the user to just keep on adding more power and memory to it

11. Joris Verschoor
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    I wonder what it’s based on. vmware xen or what?
    hmmm my dream has come true

    The Amazon EC2 Limited Beta is Currently Full

    BOOOOHOOOOO, I hate techrunch for this

12. Erik Speckman
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 9:48 am

    Techniques for scaling web applications over multiple server instances are relatively well understood and accessible to developers of moderate skill.

    What is less available is the ability to scale to multiple server instances at costs like amazon is offering. I would exepect that the availability of hosting at this pricepoint will drive the creation of frameworks and techniques to make such development and deployment even easier.

    This is not to say that it wouldn’t be “better” to be able to scale a single server instance elastically, but I don’t think that is a prerequisite for innovation in this space.

    I do think amazon needs to provide some facility for load balancing & failover for incoming requests though, before this thing can really take off, either that, or they need to allow people to provision the network topologies required to do it themselves (if they did, a 3rd party could offer a load balancing front end service to other users, built on amazons infrastructure).

    Actually, this makes me wonder, what is the cost of communicating between two E2 server instances “owned” by different entities. Is it free?

13. Chris
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 9:56 am

    According to Amazon’s info, data transfer between EC2’s or EC2 and S3 is free! See http://www.amazon.com/gp/brows.....=201590011

14. Edwin Ong
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    Joris: It is based on Xen. See the 5th screenshot on http://www.castblog.com/index......c2-review/ . Both xenwatch and xenbus are running.

15. pwb
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    I don’t really understand what this is. Is it hosting? Can I put a php + Mysql app up there?

16. BPAndrew
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 10:39 am

    pwb -

    Yes you could use this as a webhost, however it’s not really worth it if your not using a webfarm. However if you ARE, you can make your site have the smarts to add webservers when your load gets too high.

17. Greg
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 10:55 am

    pwb - As far as anyone on the outside can tell, yes it is. Internally, there’s a lot more to it, but the wonderful part of this whole thing is that it’s completely transparent to the user. I never expected this from Amazon, of all companies.

    Also, I lolled at “Almost Exclusive”.

18. Job Boj
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 11:06 am

    As for server images with built-in clustering, that might just work.. but there is a lot more to running and maintaining an application that spans more than just a single server. I think a truly elastic computing solution would allow the user to just keep on adding more power and memory to it

19. Glenn Fleishman
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 11:37 am

    Note that Amazon doesn’t consider these servers “reliable” in the sense that they state in their introduction to the service that data stored directly on them or used in memory should be considered transitory. They suggest storing data permanently by moving them off the computer into other structures. I’ll be curious if you could set up MySQL, for instance, to host its databases at S3 — doesn’t seem like that would quite work because you need a socket. Amazon database services–on-demand SQL–would be fabulous.

20. Alex Iskold
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 12:07 pm

    What impresses me the most is the holistic approach that Amazon is taking. They are carefully crafting these building blocks individually, but also, thinking about how they fit to gether to deliver collective value. This is going to be an amazing, as in A-Z (pun intended) platform for delivering the software of the future.

    Alex

21. Thomas
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Amazon is competitive with teir 1 providers. A full rack and a hundered megabit link is around 7500 a month if you go teir 1 all the way around. Amazon is around 9K if you were to duplicate the same configuration. You could easily recoup the 1500 bucks in saved operating costs and trips to the data center.

22. Gordon Mohr
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 7:41 pm

    EC2 remedies one cost inconvenience of S3. Let’s say you put 20 terabytes of unindexed bulk data into S3. Then, say you need to scan it for a string (or very similarly, index it). Just scanning over 20TB would cost ($0.20/GB * 1024GB/TB * 20) $4096 in bandwidth at $0.20/GB, be limited to public-internet speeds, and you’d still need to provide the scanning/indexing machines.

    With free bandwidth from S3 to EC2, the bandwidth and machine costs disappear. If a machine could scan at just half the 250Mb/s wire speed, it’d take under 16 days to scan 20TB and cost under $38 (!) — less than 1/100th the previous bandwidth-only cost.

    But more temporary instances seem costless to provision, so use 400 instances for 1/400th the time, and get the same 20TB scanning job done at the same cost — in under 1 hour.

    Wow.

23. SlashChick
    

    August 24th, 2006 at 10:21 pm

    “A full rack and a hundered megabit link is around 7500 a month if you go teir 1 all the way around.”

    Don’t know where you’re getting pricing, but our typical pricing is about 60% of that price, and it’s Tier-1, premium 100% uptime bandwidth all the way around. I know our pricing is fairly competitive with other colo companies out there, and if you want to go cheapo bandwidth, it’s less than half the price you are quoting.

    Amazon’s price isn’t competitive, but I don’t think it’s intended to be. This is for tiny companies that are testing things out. Most established companies are still going to want to be able to see their servers and have full access to them 24×7 through the use of KVM-over-IP, etc.