Matt Rubens

I just got an email this morning about a limited beta of the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”, designed to be the S3 of computation.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. (link)

We’re already having a great time using S3 in our top-secret-startup, and utility computation would be our Holy Grail. I wonder who at Amazon I need to name my first-born after to get one of these beta accounts… Maybe building SIPs gives me enough street cred?