Posted by Mike Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:30:52 GMT
Posted by Mike Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:03:12 GMT
Posted by Mike Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:31:44 GMT
Posted by Mike Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:30:00 GMT
I've been an Amazon EC2 evangelist for the past couple of years. The EC2 'cloud computing' service is an early entry in the on-demand hosting market, featuring practically unlimited computing resources (CPUs, storage and bandwidth) provisioned in real time via public APIs.
With a tip of the hat to Tim's Android diary:
I suspect that my experiences are going to be shared by quite a few people in the not-too-distant future, so why not record them?
My experience with EC2 involves deployment of JES environments, typically for development and testing of IAM applications. In future posts I'll share my approach and some concrete examples of how I have leveraged EC2 to save time and money.
For now, a short summary of the EC2 features that have provided value.
Most of us do not work 24 hrs per day seven days per week, so it makes not to pay for dedicated computing resources when developing applications. The EC2 rates are reasonable relative to commercial hosting services, and I suspect an order of magnitude more economical than buying servers and deploying traditional virtual hosts.
The EC2 service started with Linux OS support only, but has since added Solaris and Windows Server 2003. I use all three.
There are no online forms, or phone calls, or visits to Best Buy. Provisioning of EC2 resources can be fully automated. Use bash, Java, Perl, Ruby..., whatever.
There are open source API libraries in your favourite language, commercial management utilities, a Firefox plugin available. And of course there are many pre-built EC2 images available to the public.
Posted by Mike Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:30:40 GMT
