Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) is making a lot of buzz in the tech industry, and rightfully so. With EC2, you can ramp up to a massive server farm in a matter of minutes, while scaling back down to a single server when things calm down. The benefits are obvious, as you only pay for what you need and you have access to more computing power right when you need it.

EC2 works on the idea of server instances. You start with building one instance, which only costs 10 cents per hour of operation. An instance acts just like a dedicated machine, with full root access and the ability to install any software you choose. Each instance also comes with some pretty competitive system specs including:

  • 1.7 Ghz Xeon CPU
  • 1.75 GB of RAM
  • 160 GB of local storage
  • 250 MB/s network interface

If your first instance gets some heavy traffic, EC2 can build another one automatically for another 10 cents an hour. Turnkey infrastructure has never been better. Read the rest of this entry »