Monday, December 14, 2009

Amazon.com Adds Spot Bidding For EC2

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, the web services arm of Amazon.com, is looking to allow users of its Amazon EC2 cloud computing service to bid on spot pricing for the service. According to Amazon, its new Spot Instances service allows users to bid on unused, Amazon EC2 capacity to run their cloud software. The new service allows developers to specify a "bid price" that they are willing to pay for access to Amazon's computing cloud, scheduling those apps in only when compute power can be purchased at less than the bid price. The firm said the new service is aimed at applications which accept flexible start and stop times. It appears that Amazon is looking to better balance supply and demand of its cloud computing instances with the new service, which is aimed at applications such as web crawling, life sciences, load testing, financial modeling, and other users who are running background or less time sensitive applications on its cloud.