Amazon has a new web service in limited Beta, Amazon EC2 [techcrunch take here], a compute-on-demand facility that’s very interesting and different from the standard hosting models already out there. You pay for exactly the computing power you ne…

Perhaps then there is an opportunity for someone to use EC2 based websites, you could easily create an sort of ISP or ASP model using this, by putting about 20 little websites/application servers on one Image.

BTW Jonathan… I’m from little old New Zealand and I managed to nab a slot!

It appears to be based on Xen, judging from the sample hostnames in the docs.

I am also stuck in limbo land: they sent the email out at 3AM PST, which is just rude: a west-coast company should at least wait until California and Washington wakes up before sending out a limited beta. Methinks the geeks in NYC and boston and the research triangle got all the slots.

So, to do a quick napkin calculation – $0.10 per hour x 24 hours x 31 days = $74.40 per month to keep an instance running around the clock.

That makes me think that applications using this service will need to be designed around some clever resource usage, either through scheduled tasks or some interesting way to respond on demand. Simply running a straight PHP app would seem a bit wasteful in many small-scale cases.

If I were to run a blog from it, say, I’d lean more toward the Movable Type school of static publishing than the WordPress school of live PHP pages. Of course, that could all be done from a behind-firewall personal desktop machine, so I need to think of a better example.

Then again, being able to add and drop instances at will is a big, big deal for larger scale applications.

it charges by the CPU hour

Just to prevent confusion: They call it instance hours and mean the hours a vm/instance has been running (independent of utilization).
Only saying this, beause some hosts, like dreamhost, use(d) the term CPU-minutes for keeping track of “how much time a processor spends working for your username” and allow(ed) sth. like 60 CPU-minutes a day.

At least that’s how I understand the amazon offer.

And thanks for the pointer! It’ll be intereting to watch what people are going to come up with. Given that the instances are not “persistent”, i.e. data is gone when you stop them (unless you move things int S3 or elsewhere), I am assuming that they will be used differently from regular dedicated machines.

It reminds a little bit of DSL (Damnsmalllinux) which boots/runs of a CD, but allows you to save all your data and customization to an external storage (usb/ftp/etc.) and does auto-restore when you boot into it again. This is nice for people afraid of viruses or getting hacked etc.. I wonder whether this will turn out to be a plus for amazons offer as well. At first it does make things a bit more complicated wrt to usual linux way. But I guess tose things can be solved…