Understanding Amazon’s EC3 (Cloud Computing)

Categories: Data Storage, Web ToolsPosted on September 28th, 2006

I just learned from Julio about Amazon’s next major move called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta. You know about Amazon’s entery into Online Data Storage right? Smugmug pays them $27,000 a month as a storage utility, it’s a pay as you go model.

“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) 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.”

Making IT a Utlity (like Power, Gas, Cable)
They are building a complete outsourcing of your IT department for consumers, small business, and in some cases medium sized businesses. Perhaps soon they will provide helpdesk support (pay per minute), rent desktops and laptops (pay per minute) or even access to applications (like photoshop) via a web tunnel or some type of pay-per-minute usage fee.

Want to learn more about Online Data Storage? I’ve predicted these things happening here (I know I push this post, but it’s not because I want traffic, but it’s because there are some important changes happening)

More Resources

Alexis defines EC3 in more detail
He points to Pillbox which is running on EC2
Amazon’s Dev Blog

Share This Post:

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 5:24 am and is filed under Data Storage, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is very significant and I would argue that it is going to change the long-term managed services game. It commoditizes the offering and simplifies the process. It will be interesting to watch how the space evolves when the service can meet regulatory needs such as HIPAA.

Posted by Rob Grady on September 30th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

[...] Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Understanding Amazon’s EC3 (Cloud Computing) [...]

Posted by Rob Grady » Blog Archive » Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Yahoo’s on September 30th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

I did an article about EC2 when it just came out, there’s also an interesting discussion in comments. Hope you’ll find it useful:

http://www.maluke.com/blog/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2

Posted by Sergey on October 7th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

EC3 –> EC2

You’re probably transposing the number with “S3″. Not really your fault — whoever decided that these products should have abbreviations and numbers instead of real names is totally cracked.

Posted by Jeffrey McManus on January 5th, 2007 at 10:33 am

yeah, totally cracked.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 5th, 2007 at 10:42 am

[...] Image stolen from Jeremiah, who discusses more about cloud computing here. [...]

Posted by SqlServer 2008 Spatial is Standard Issue « The Memory Leak on October 10th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

This sounds similar to what salesforce.com is offering with their force.com platform, except force.com seems to be a little more developed. Force.com includes quite a platform of developer tools and languages, not to mention an integrated database. It sounds a little more limited than amazon’s general offering though. It will be interesting to see what these service driven architectures develop into in the future.

Posted by someone on December 10th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

Just a quick like to let you know that a new version of the ec2/s3-based service you mentioned is now available on http://www.piworx.com

Posted by Alexis Smirnov on January 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am

[...] Jeremiah mentions in his blog, the recent beta release of Amazon’s EC2 (Electronic Compute Cloud) which I believe is one of a series of continuing significant releases. Amazon has started to leverage their infrastructure by offering it as a service with the S3 (Simple Storage Solution) and now with most recently with EC2. This is significant because it introduces variable cost ways of what has traditionally been an expensive proposition. S3 provides the ability to store and transfer data at extremely cheap rates while EC2 enables organizations to create an ‘instance’ of their server and implement it in minutes. A recently completed project required the upgrade of the primary web server (purchase new hardware, software, installation at the hosting facility, etc) as well as partnering with a Content Delivery Vendor. In a perfect world, utilizing the Amazon services could have saved us considerable hard costs and time. Of course any time you put ‘beta’ in front of a service, it is tough to endorse it as a primary solution since it will essentially negate an SLA. I look forward to considering the Amazon web services as a production solution when it is ready. Yesterday, Yahoo released their Browser-Based Authentication which provides third-party web-apps the ability to leverage (with the user’s permission) Yahoo user ids. “You build great web applications. We have millions of users who store their data on Yahoo!. Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) makes it possible for your applications to use that data (with their permission). BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.” [...]

Posted by Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Yahoo’s Authentication | Rob Grady on July 20th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

[...] I was told to look at included Enomaly’s info on EC2, ODE’s original news release about EC2, and Web Strategist’s guide to [...]

Posted by Finding information on the Web: Beyond Google - Other Search Engines on December 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 pm