Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
03 11 2007
Last night, I had the pleasure of meeting with Mike Culver, of amazon.com who gave a tremendous presentation about their Amazon Web Services offerings, including the Elastic Compute (EC2 / EC3) technology. Compared to the 180 people Mike spoke with a couple of evening ago, the ten or so dedicated people who turned up to hear him at the Irish Computer Society offices in Dublin was a small crowd - but a more intimate discussion ensued as a result. Since a few people already had experience with EC3/S3, we bucked the trend and started asking questions of Mike before he even had a chance to start his talk.
For me, the most interesting services offered were the Elastic Computation service (EC3) and the storage service (S3.) The EC3 and S3 business model is what differentiates it from the more traditional model of having to burn cash up front to allow for reserve capacity for growth. With the S3 and EC3 systems, you can call down more storage and spin up another virtual server instance on demand - and you only pay for what you use! Of course, since all the machines are Xen instances, and are created by Amazon's back end on demand, you can scale back down as efficiently and cost effectively as you scale up. Currently, if you have one instance running all the time for a whole month, it costs about $72, plus bandwidth charges. If you only use it for an hour, you get charged ~10c.
Unfortunately, due to having to catch a 3am flight the next morning, this talk did not culminate in the traditional ILUG jaunt to the local pub. We'll have to invite Mike over again some time so he can experience the more esoteric post-talk question and answer session, where the questions often become more and more interesting, although less and less relevant, as the evening proceeds.
Huge thanks to Mike for speaking, to Niall O'Broin and Paul O'Malley for organising the event, and to the ICS for generously provising a venue.
Finally, don't forget the ILUG AGM 2007 tomorrow (well, later today by now...) Sat 3rd Nov, 2007, 3pm in the ICS building.
posted at: 00:37 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
