Adaptive Path Blog

A few days ago, I finally got an Amazon EC2 beta account, spent a little time playing with it and had some initial thoughts about the service.

The Getting Started Guide was reasonably straightforward with the expected gotcha’s and a couple unclear instructions. Took me about an hour to set up a stock virtual machine, get it running, modify it, save my changes to an encrypted copy stored on S3, and relaunch my my customized version. Not bad. Still, the process is complicated enough my mother is never going to do this and anybody who is not familiar with unix command lines is going to be pestering their geek friends for help.

The pricing is such that if you need one machine, it’s cheaper and more reliable to go to ServerBeach, Rackspace or some other dedicated hosting provider. Bandwidth costs are not that high but if you have an application that involves huge amounts of bandwidth, you can beat the pricing by buying in bulk. The RAM provided on the virtual machine doesn’t seem beefy enough for anything involving a heavy database work. And the transitory aspect of the machines (and IP addresses) provide some challenges.

That being said, it seems clear that there could be some great opportunities here for rapidly scaling up and down in a cost effective manner, the challenge being how to architect an application to be able to take advantage of this. Seems like somebody should set up an service that acts as a front end to EC2, transparently proxying requests, providing load balancing and scaling up or down as needed. There’s a need for user friendly tools to create, manage, launch, and save instances. Could be cool for teaching too. Give each student their own linux box w/ root access for the duration of the class or quarter.

Ultimately, whether or not we harness EC2 to solve our current needs, I’m most interested in seeing the new types of applications that evolve. My experience is that it is easier to perceive problems when we have the tools to build solutions. This is a new tool in the toolbox and there is potentially a whole new class of problems that we can solve. I think we’ll see some entirely innovative uses for EC2.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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