Sasidhar | Blog

First they came up with S3 the simple storage service. Now, taking that a step further, Amazon has launched the EC2 services.

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud.

Here is my understanding of how it works. They have a huge setup of servers (machines, maybe simple ones being used as servers) with large disk spaces and computing power. They tried selling it as S3 for anyone who wanted an easy access to large scale service such as this. Then, they realized they could do better by selling computational resources, and not just storage space that they had.

The best part about Amazon’s EC2 is, that you only pay for whatever resources you end up using!

Here is the official description. “Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.”

Other strengths/ highlights:

- Scalability. Elastic in nature, which means user controlled use of servers.

- Control

- Integration with S3

- Reliable and secure. This is what most companies or organizations want. They don’t mind spending that extra buck on a service that caters to their needs with reliability and high end security. But now they don’t have to !

- Inexpensive. Firstly, you pay only what you use. Secondly, the rates are …..inspiring !

As with S3, analysts and market guru’s are busy trying to understand the cost model for E2. And according to some estimates, Amazon needs to end up with millions of users to start making any profit on both these services.

Here is the offical page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011