Amazon Web Services - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

So many folks know Amazon for their books and the oodles of other online e-commerce (buy and wait for it to get delivered) retail store. They also do a nice job (at least through my Roku) with on-demand movies and such. The skinny of this post is about Amazon's "Web Services" (AWS) focused on the "Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2) http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ product.

The service started a few years back but it has only been a year since they added the Elastic Block Store (EBS) http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html which (in my opinion) makes this a truly viable multi-server computing solution.

Now, I have not yet utilized this service in production so I can not yet speak to that but so far I have spent some cycles on the development side and honestly I have to say I am not sure what I ever did without it.

There is a very small learning curve to get the management console moving along but the getting started guide is well put together http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/

Once you get the hang (as I say this is straight forward) of the console now you can go and find your machine images http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=171. These images are made by Amazon, Sun, IBM, Oracle and an entire community of folks that share images they have made.

Here are just a few:

Perl Web Starter
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, Perl, Mason, Apache 2.0, and MySQL.

Java Web Starter
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, Java 5 EE, Tomcat, Apache, and MySQL.

LAMP Web Starter
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, PHP5, Apache 2.2, and MySQL.

Ruby on Rails Web Starter
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, Ruby, Rails, RubyGems, Mongrel, and MySQL.

Amazon Public Images - Windows Server 2003 R2 With Authentication Services and SQL Server Express + IIS + ASP.NET (32bit)

Amazon Public Images - Windows Server 2003 R2 and SQL Server Express + IIS + ASP.NET (64bit)

Being a developer I like to have platforms ready to go for acomplishing what I need to get done. Having these "pre-packaged" enviornments that I can utilize (put simply) reduces cycle times and allows focus for the task at hand.

Amazon is not the only provider (just the only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) I have used).

Here are some other services:

• Rackspace http://www.rackspacecloud.com/
• 3tera http://www.3tera.com/
• GoGrid http://www.servepath.com/cloud-hosting/index.php

Some open source projects (in case you happen to have your own data center with nothing to-do):

• Eucalyptus http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusOverview
• Nimbus http://workspace.globus.org/
  

/*
Joe Stein
http://www.linkedin.com/in/charmalloc
*/