Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Written on May 6th, 2008
The Amazon EC2 service is a rather revolutionary cloud computing system that came out in late 2006. It provides a fairly flexible infrastructure that allows you to launch application servers on demand. Traditionally new web companies are forced to pay for rather expensive co-location facilities for their servers, with little or not thought given to scalability (which isn’t always a bad thing, considering most companies never reach a point where they need scalability). That being said, for a company that either requires scalability, or is looking for new ways to reduce costs, Amazon EC2 might be a good fit. Unfortunately, since every EC2 instance is essentially a virtualized computer, all data in an instance is lost should the instance suddenly terminate. There are several ways around this, such as storing instances and data over on Amazon’s S3 service, but unfortunately none of them are entirely straightforward (especially if you’re looking […]
