Understanding Amazon’s EC3 (Cloud Computing)
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
8 Comments so far
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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.
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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
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.
yeah, totally cracked.
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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.
Just a quick like to let you know that a new version of the ec2/s3-based service you mentioned is now available on www.piworx.com