I’m starting to wonder if someone over at Amazon really does have a master plan to take over the world. Today they announced the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). EC2 allows you to have a “virtual computer” hosted at Amazon which is roughly equivalent to a “1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth”. Pricing $0.10/hour, $0.20/GB of Internet traffic and $0.15/GB/month of S3 storage used. Running a system 24×7 would set you back $72/month plus S3 storage costs.
The folks who thought S3 wouldn’t change things, may start changing mind now. Amazon has a ton of information up on this new service: Developer Tools, WDSL, Forum, FAQ and a Getting started guide.
Right now they only support Linux based systems, but hopefully we’ll see that expand. I’m voting for FreeBSD support! Amazon is using XEN to virtualize these systems, so hoping for FreeBSD support seems reasonable.
I’m on the waiting list for next beta round, I look forward to trying this out. Expect to hear more about this.