Amazon's EC2

Last week in the PLUG (Philly Linux User Group)meeting, we had Toby giving us an overview of Amazons Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). It was quite interesting. EC2 aims to remove the headache of planning and maintaining a data center. You can get an instance (the minimum config is like 1.7 Ghz proc with 160GB drive and 2GB RAM) which is like a Xen VM. So we can install and configure this instance however we want and if we want to scale our app or whatever we have, we can just pay and add more processor or RAM or storage. This is kinda nice but Toby briefed about some of the problems as well. Like, they dont have persistent storage. If the instance crashes for some reason, you would lose the data that is in memory. Just few days ago, Amazon announced that it has brought in persistence to EC2. Also Ec2 is not good for hosting transaction oriented applications but would be good for some distributed app. Toby pointed that Ec2 with Hadoop would be a great combination. It was good to know about the pros and cons of EC2. I had one of my biggest doubts clarified. I was earlier improperly comparing EC2 with Google App Engine. Both of the support as a platform for cloud computing but in their own different ways. EC2 offers a machine instance called Amazon Machine Image (AMI) where you get to install the OS and other applications that you want and can run absolutely anything you want. Google App Engine is a platform to host web applications where the infrastructure is completely managed by Google