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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

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 literrally 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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