EC2 News More Than Expected

Wow, I was not expecting all of the announcements that happened today. I knew that EC2 was coming out of beta, that has been talked about for some time now, and we all knew that EC2 Windows boxes would be available this Fall, but I can't say that I was expecting the other news. It is exciting though for companies like DigitalChalk that rely on excellent services around cloud computing.

You can see everything that was announced today on the Amazon Web Services Blog. While I am excited about EC2 being out of beta and playing around with the new Windows instances starting at 12.5 cents per hour, the other news is even more interesting.

• Amazon released an SLA for EC2
• Amazon plans to release an AWS management console
• Amazon is planning to release load balancing, auto scaling and cloud monitoring services

That is a lot of WOW factor for one day. I am particularly interested in seeing what is possible with the management console and the load balancing, scaling and monitoring tools. This could be as simple as EC2 images preconfigured with HAProxy, Hyperic and other tools, or it could go as far as what RightScale offers with their tools.

There is much to look forward to!

Microsoft in the Cloud

Well, we knew it was coming... Microsoft has been working on a cloud computing initiative and today... Oops! Amazon beat them to the punch. Amazon announced today that they will be putting Windows on EC2 before the end of the year. This has to be a bummer for Balmer and company over at Microsoft who have been working on an initiative that should be announced next month. I am very interested to see how Amazon is pricing this and how they deal with Microsoft licensing. I really hope that they keep to the same model where they charge by the hour instead of throwing extra requirements for a valid license key for each server you stand up. That would defeat the purpose of "infinite" scalability. I haven't seen any talk about the model yet other than a mention of the same "pay as you go pricing", but I am sure interested in the nitty gritty details. I can't say for certain that we will be using Windows on Amazon at DigitalChalk, but I will be playing around on it you can be sure just to see how it performs.