tecznotes

I had my EC2 account activated today, and immediately ran off to follow the instructions to see how it works.

Apart from Amazon's baffling array of ID's, secret keys, user keys, certs, and other identifiers that need to be kept track of every few steps, EC2 is a winner. It does exactly what it promises, running virtual machine instances that can be instantiated and destroyed at will. The first one takes a few minutes to boot, and the process of making a machine snapshot is slightly laborious, but once the initial hurdles are clear, saved machine states start up almost instantaneously and are immediately available for use.

Combined with S3 for storage, this is a total winner. It's fortunate I just happen to be working on something that could benefit from 20 or so dedicated servers chugging away...

My costs so far: $0.31.