Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud

As the world is awaiting the vision of free bandwidth, computing & storage to become a reality, several players are making related moves. After Amazon storage,now is the turn of amazon computing. Amazon clearly walks the talk. Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels recently again highlighted the importance of Amazon Web Services. He pointed out that Amazon.com technology and data is made available through the AWS (Amazon Web Services) e-commerce services. This, he added is a free Web-services interface for developers, which they can use to build (and charge for) their own applications on top of Amazon and there are about 150,000 of these developers and Amazon considers them important customers. With AWS and Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality to create storefronts on the fly.

Now comes the news of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2). This is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Sun and Google are at itfor sometime. One can expect Google to follow suit with more vigour and focus. This has the potential to get trendy as well.