Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service

RebornData writes "I receieved an e-mail this morning inviting me to participate in a limited beta of Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It's a grid computing service that allows you to create and upload your own Linux-based machine images and run them in Amazon's system, starting at $.10 per "instance hour" (each machine instance being equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM, and 160GB disk). You can use their tools to create and start new instances dynamically to meet whatever your particular capacity needs are at any given moment. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are explicitly supported, but any distro based on the 2.6 kernel should work. The service documentation provides more technical details. Unfortunately, it appears that the beta is limited to existing Amazon S3 users, and is already full."

Burstable Servers

[peterdaly]

At $.10 per hour, that makes a single server instance about $72 per month. If you have minimal storage needs, it can compete with a low end leased server, plus it has other advantages not present in the physical leased box world.

Personally I don't have any need for a scalable system such as this, but it certainly opens the possibility for products or projects that may not otherwise be feasible.

Have a CPU intensive batch job that can broken up and distributed? Use these boxes during the run then eliminate them when it's done. Only pay for the time you use.

At a previous job I had a task that would have been perfect for a burst-able cloud like this. Example:

Every evening we had a large number of scanned tiff images that needed to be manipulated, and a short time window in which to do it. Tiff image manipulation takes a lot of CPU resources and time. We ended up purchasing a bunch of blade servers that sat idle for the 22 hours a day they we not running images. Something like what Amazon is offering may have been a very high performance and cost effective solution to that type of problem. The control via web services could automate the whole process.

Who uses this stuff?

[fm6]

This is the umpteenth grid service where anybody can buy huge gobs of computer time. The question is, is there really anybody out there who needs to do this and doesn't have their own hardware? Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

Great Pricing

[kognate]

I like their pricing a great deal. It's much, much, much cheaper than many of the alternatives (notable the Sun one) AND you do not have to build your apps to use some proprietary IPC that's no good outside of their cluster.

For example, lets say I had a MPICH (or even a custom) application that I wanted to run. I'm just some joe schoe, so I
can't use the cluster in my (academic) department. I can run my application for one hour using 1000 "computers" for about $100 USD.
That's pretty good. It would cost me $1000 to use the Sun N1 stuff AND I would have to use the N1 grid-engine to develop my app.

Can't wait to see what comes out of the Beta. People give Amazon a bad rap because they're not Google, but make no mistake: they are innovators too.

Re:Who uses this stuff?

[OverlordQ]

Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

No, what if you need to do a one-off job. Which is cheaper $.10/hour or paying somebody full time, buying supplies, paying for labor to put it together, paying for power to run it, and then letting it sit there gathering dust.

There's no way you can get parts for the systems and labor for an admin to ~$72/month/server

Re:Burstable Servers

[e4g4]

Saving sick people, or at least contributing to the solution seems like a legitimate and justifiable use of our (admittedly unrenewable) resources. At least, far more than driving a Ford Expedition to pick up milk and bread...

....What was the article about again? :-P