[Gllug] Anyone used Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud (grid computing type thingy)?

[Harry]

> That's not really the same thing as Amazon's EC2. Its just another virtual
> hosting provider - the on-demand grid thing they offer is only for virtual
> hosting of websites not dedicated servers... (snip)

Thanks Dan, for elaborating on how EC2 differs from other virtual hosting
solutions.

> Simiarly if you expect a /.'ing you can ramp up your application server / web
> farm for 1 day & then cut it back down to normal size after the rush has gone.
> Normal virtual hosting models just don't offer this kind of on-demand scaling,

Note, however, that the blurb at Mediatemple's site does say...

<quote>
The Grid's on-demand scalability means you'll always be ready for intense
bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online
success.
</quote>

Harry

> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:11:14PM +0100, Harry wrote:
>> This place might be of interest:
>> 
>> http://www.mediatemple.net/
> 
> That's not really the same thing as Amazon's EC2. Its just another virtual
> hosting provider - the on-demand grid thing they offer is only for virtual
> hosting of websites not dedicated servers. The thing that makes EC2 more
> appealing is that you are not billed monthly on a per-machine basis, instead
> you are billed on an hourly basis per-VM. There are nice OS image management
> tools for creating generic VM filesystem templates for quick provisioning.
> You can quite literally create & destroy VM instances in 2-3 minutes with
> EC2. So if you have job that takes a week to run on a single machine, you
> can instead just create 14 machines, run the job across them & 12 hours
> later, destroy them. Not locked into having 14 machines for a whole month.
> Simiarly if you expect a /.'ing you can ramp up your application server / web
> farm for 1 day & then cut it back down to normal size after the rush has gone.
> Normal virtual hosting models just don't offer this kind of on-demand scaling,
> in particular no attractive billing model for it.
> 
>>> http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately the beta is closed for new registrations right now, but
>>> the project looks brilliant - exactly what we need for our
>>> number-crunching needs.  Has anyone got on the beta?
> 
> Dan.

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