Commodity virtualization with Amazon EC2 August 25, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : virtualization , trackbackThe blogosphere is going batty talking about Amazon EC2; their ‘limited beta’ service for provisioning virtual Linux machine hosting via a web service API. The core idea isn’t anything new, I had a virtual Linux box with Bytemark Hosting back when they had one of the few virtual hosting offerings available. EC2’s web service API is just too cool however; think about the possibility of building a web application that can respond to increasing load, perhaps due to a Slashdotting/Diggdotting, through requesting to EC2 that more application/web server VM instances be brought online to satisfy the increased load.
A few other random thoughts:
- Do Amazon risk stretching their operational support capacity too far, between EC2, S3, SQS; oh, and the fact that they are running one of the biggest e-commerce operations around?
- What virtualization technology are they using? I initially wondered if it was VMware ESX but I am now hearing that it is Xen (no mention on the EC2 website itself though).
- Is there a potential market in selling pre-configured Amazon Machine Images to be hosted in EC2?
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