Amazon’s EC2 cloud moves into production
Amazon has announced that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) product has moved out of beta and into production. Basically, the service allows businesses to lease virtual application servers in the computing cloud instead of physically housing and maintaining the hardware themselves. The service is particularly valuable for clients whose server needs vary widely across short time increments.
Amazon describes their EC2 service as “ a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” The EC2 service is one part of Amazon’s bevy of Web services offerings, and has been in beta for about 26 months. The company offers a wide variety of infrastructure, payment & billing, Web, and information services products.
Commenting on the announcement, Frank Gillett, an analyst from Forrester Research, said, “The appealing thing about EC2 is that instead of buying a server, you pay for it by the hour. That’s great if your need for servers goes up and down or is temporary. If you’re going to run servers steady all year, it is less appealing to have a different way of paying for it. The idea basically is that you rent a server by the hour instead of having to set up and fiddle with it and do all that stuff.”
Amazon’s EC2 web service interface allows clients to obtain and configure capacity with minimal difficulty. It provides them with complete control of their computing resources and lets them run applications in Amazon’s proven computing environment. The time needed to obtain and boot new server instances is reduced to minutes, instead of hours or days. It is possible for an Amazon EC2 client to quickly scale computing power and storage as their needs for those services change.
During beta operations, the EC2 services have been available only on Sun Microsystems platforms. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has recently added support for the Windows platform. Although Windows support is currently in beta, the availability of the Windows platform vastly expands the applications that can be run on Amazon servers.
Recent developments in Cloud Storage, taken together with Amazon’s EC2 offering, are ushering in a new era in flexibility for IT shops of all kinds. Especially given the current sluggish economic climate, and rapidly changing business conditions, the availability of dynamic application and storage facilities in the Computing Cloud may be arriving at exactly the right time.
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