Friday, August 25, 2006

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon have just launched a limited Beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud", and I think that the ground may be shifting in our business.

Details are a bit sketchy at the moment but it seems that we are essentially being offered the ability to host and serve our own web applications on Amazon's infrastructure. Scaleable, pay as you go, access to effectively limitless capacity would really have got us out of a hole in January.

All our public facing systems are built on Windows Server and this offering seems to be Linux based, but maybe the Ray Ozzie era Microsoft will be spurred by this to offer something similar as part of the Windows Live initiative.

Interesting times, watch this space.

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