Thursday, March 12, 2009

Amazon Adds EC2 Reservations

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing effort of Amazon.com, said this morning that it has added a new pricing option for its Amazon EC2 service called Reserved Instances. According to Amazon, the new offering will allow its users to reserve capacity on its service in exchange for a lower cost. The firm said that reserved instances will be charged a one-time payment in exchange for the better pricing; companies will be allowed to reserve chunks of computing power in one-year and three-year terms. Amazon said the reserved computing power will function identically to existing, "on-demand" instances, which can be created instantly by developers. The new program looks to be an effort by Amazon to better forecast its infrastructure needs with EC2, which is used by companies to create cloud-based server images to scale out their own applications and web sites.