Amazon get into the virtual computing space
Aug 25th, 2006 by Phil Dawes
This looks really interesting! -Basically Amazon are offering pay-as-you-go computing. Each instance is equivalent to a physical server with 1.7 GHz Xeon CPU, 1.75 GB RAM, 160 GB of local disk, and 250 Mbps of connectivity. You even get root access. Prices are:
* $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
* $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).
I haven’t spent much time looking at this, but as far as I can see you create an ‘image’ on a computing instance, and then use web-service APIs to dynamically use it to bring up more instances as demand dictates. Unfortunately I’m too late for the limited beta. bah.
Didn’t Sun launch something like this a few months ago?
Sort of - however the Sun grid offering is targetted and priced for traditional enterprise clients and established industries who want to bolster their number-crunching horsepower (see faq). I think this is a bit before it’s time - enterprise still hasn’t got used to the idea of taking data out of its own intranet.
I think the interesting thing about amazon’s offering is that it is clearly priced and targetted at the low end of the market. This is the sector I think will push demand for service grid technologies in the same way it has for cheap web hosting: individuals and startups wanting to start small but then needing to scale up close to the demand curve (rather than risking VC upfront for their server facilities).