Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud: EC2

Amazon has announced its Elastic Compute Cloud.

From the press release:

"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."

From the beta test email: (Chris Pirillo)

"At this stage, we’re only accepting a limited number of beta customers, so if you’re interested in Amazon EC2, we recommend you move fast. If you find that our beta is full by the time you sign up, please accept our apologies and stay ready. As soon as we can accommodate more participants, we will e-mail those of you who have given us your e-mail addresses and you’ll have another chance to try Amazon EC2…"

From Engadget:

"Each virtual server instance they get gives 'em the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of disk space, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth, of which they can of course get as many as they like (or can afford), with prices starting at just $0.10 per instance-hour consumed and $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon."

From Maluke:

"Just in case you missed it — your instances can be web servers, database servers, load balancers, anything. The traffic within Amazon EC2 and S3 is free, so you can have setups as funky as you wish. Remeber what it takes to build Flickr or Livejournal datacenter? Now you can do similar setups from home (unbelievable) and just let Amazon take care of the networking and hardware. This is so much more ‘WebOS’ than Google’s walled garden."

From the Washington Post: (China Post)

"For instance, they said Linden Lab, creator of the Second Life virtual reality Web site, needed extra storage to accommodate a surge of viewer downloads on the first day of a software release. Powerset Inc., which offers a natural language approach for searching the Web, announced Wednesday that it would use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to run its business."