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Amazon's EC2 opens up and scales out

Amazon Web Services, the utility computing company, formally opened its Elastic Compute Cloud beta to all developers and added new instance types, including an "Extra Large with 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units and 1690 GB of instance storage.Instances$0.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

Amazon Web Services, the utility computing company, formally opened its Elastic Compute Cloud beta to all developers and added new instance types, including an "Extra Large with 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units and 1690 GB of instance storage.

Instances

$0.10 - Small Instance (Default)

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform $0.40 - Large Instance

7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform $0.80 - Extra Large Instance

15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

According to Amazon, more than 265,000 developers have signed for Amazon Web Services, including EC2 and the S3 storage service, so far. Over time Amazon Web Services could be a far bigger and more lucrative business than the dominating Amazon.com retail operation. As the planet goes more digital, Amazon will use its infrastructure expertise, as Google does for its services or as Sun is attempting to do with its solutions, to power its own digital services at the head of the tail and millions of long tail businesses.

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