Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Better known as the Amazon EC2. Somehow I missed the coverage about this innovation back in August 2006. In my opinion, it's a revolutionary product.

This amplifies the fact that the cost of building a web-driven business is dropping significantly. It makes more sense now to bet on reliable services built to scale and be readily available 24x7 -- $72 for a workhorse server is value for money.

Excerpt from Techcrunch:

Amazon Web Services are readying their latest service called EC2 which will allow users to setup and run servers and computing capacity in the cloud. Users of the service can setup a server instance which is hosted with Amazon, and then access and use the servers they setup just like any other. With EC2 there would no longer be a requirement to source and setup physical hardware and the virtual server instances are charged back to the user based on the CPU, storage and bandwidth usage.

The pricing of EC2 is 10 cents per instance hour (which comes to $72 per month for a server that is always available), 20 cents per GB of bandwidth and 15 cents per GB of storage (storage is with S3). Compared to traditional server providers such as ev1servers this may not be priced low enough (especially the bandwidth cost, considering most hosting providers include 2000GB or more of bandwidth) but it may prove to be a good solution for some users.

Now all we need is a robust geographical spread of such facilities to cater for customers outside of North America. With the recent Asian Internet crisis, it is imperative that businesses aim to cater towards their local / regional target markets first.

Related links:

• Techcrunch: Almost Exclusive: Amazon Readies Utility Computing Service
• Amazon: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• BBC: Asia communications hit by quake (26 Dec 06)