A beta tester “writing”:http://www.maluke.com/blog/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2 about Amazon’s “Elastic Computing Cloud”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011, which is a fully programmatic virtual computing environment:
The main point of course is that it can be set up and torn down programmaticaly. It works like this: you upload a system image (Amazon Machine Image or AMI) and then make a call to boot it, you use another call to monitor the status of your instances, once they boot up you know the domain name you can use to connect to the instance, for ex. domU-12-31-33-00-00-01.dc3.compute.amazonaws.com.
It only supports Linux at the moment, and I have one particular use for this service that would need Windows, so I can’t wait until it supports OS’es other than Linux.
Just in case you missed it — your instances can be web servers, database servers, load balancers, anything. The traffic within Amazon EC2 and S3 is free, so you can have setups as funky as you wish. Remeber what it takes to build Flickr or Livejournal datacenter? Now you can do similar setups from home (unbelievable) and just let Amazon take care of the networking and hardware. This is so much more ‘WebOS’ than Google’s walled garden.
From Amazon’s own description of EC2:
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.
This is a pretty amazing service and the closest equivalent I can think of to “Mainframe Linux on the S390/Z900″:http://linas.org/linux/i370.html which allowed for on-the-fly instantiation and breakdown of virtual Linux servers.
