Kavin told me about this, pretty cool stuff…

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Limited BetaAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

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.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications,
  libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use our
  pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools
  that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable
  and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed.
• Pay for the instance hours and bandwidth that you actually consume.

Service Highlights

• Elastic
  Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease
  capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one,
  hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of
  course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your
  application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its
  needs.
• Completely Controlled
  You have complete control of
  your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact
  with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides
  the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM,
  160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
• Designed for use with Amazon S3
  Amazon EC2 works in
  conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide a
  combined solution for computing and storage across a wide range of
  applications.
• Reliable
  Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable
  environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and reliably
  commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network
  infrastructure and datacenters.
• Secure
  Amazon EC2 provides web service
  interfaces to control network security. You define groups of instances
  and their desired accessibility.
• Inexpensive
  Amazon EC2 passes on to you
  the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for
  the compute capacity you actually consume. Compare this with the
  significant up-front expenditures traditionally required to purchase
  and maintain hardware, either in-house or hosted. This frees you from
  many of the complexities of capacity planning, transforms what are
  commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs, and
  removes the need to over-buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic
  traffic spikes.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services

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