Thursday, August 24, 2006

Amazon Takes On Virtual Computing

Amazon.com has announced a new, virtual computing service as part of its Amazon Web Services program, saying today in an announcement to its AWS developers that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service is now in limited beta. The new web service allows users to create virtual computing services, equivalent to a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. The new service connects into Amazon's S3 storage service. The move is the first by a service provider to provide virtual computing as a web service; previously, the use of virtual computing has been limited to companies that have set up virtual server systems using VMware's popular VMware virtualization software, or through the Linux Xen project. Amazon said that the new EC2 service will reduce the time required to obtain and boot a new server, and allow for scaling of capacity as computing requirements change. The pricing for the service is based on transfer of data and hours of use, at $0.10 per instance-hour consumed by the virtual server, and $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon.