Following hot on the heels of their innovative S3 service comes EC2. Yes, it’s more London postcodes. Or rather, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. A web service that provides people with the ability to execute arbitrary applications in their computing environment. This is a staggering and completely brilliant innovation.

Basically, you sign up to the service, download some Java tools and build then deploy an image that contains the applications you want. Standard Fedora images are provided by default, including Fedora 4 core, plus others with Apache and MySQL. If you suddenly need more machines, you just log in and grab another one.

Each virtual machine is equivalent to a 1.7Ghz Xeon server with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of HD, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

Costs are:

• $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). Amazon encourage you to use S3 for persistent storage.

Furthermore, data transferred between EC2 instances and/or S3 is free.

Because you only pay what you use, you can set up virtual machines with very specific tasks, thus improving maintainability and security. Amazon even recommends having one machine dedicated to monitoring your other machines.