LABS
OPINION: TECH DIRECTIONS
Just when Jim Rapoza thought he’d
seen the worst technology bills of all
time, along comes the Spy Act
PAGE 50
Stretching your resources
TECH ANALYSIS: AMAZON.COM’S ELASTIC COMPUTE CLOUD ALLOWS AD HOC VM DEPLOYMENTS
By Jason Brooks approach. The idea of com-
In the recent crowd pute power as a utility is
of interesting develop- not new, but, by enabling
ments in the world of users to consume these
server virtualization, resources in the form of
Amazon.com’s Elastic arbitrary operating sys-
Compute Cloud, or EC2, tem instances, EC2 offers
may be the most exciting. an extremely comfortable
The service, which is cur- scalability arc.
rently in a limited beta eWeek Labs was able to
period, lets companies or begin getting things done
individuals rent compute with EC2 within minutes,
time on Amazon.com’s data and, with careful crafting,
centers for running Xen vir- a company could deploy
tual machines. AMIs (Amazon Machine We installed a Firefox plug-in that provided a simple GUI for
manipulating the EC2 service.
The service, combined Images) in clusters to
with the burgeoning num- respond dynamically to shoulder increasedloadbut and 250MB per second of
bers of template operating peaks in traffic or other alsospawnthoseinstances network bandwidth. For
system images and soft- usage. (AMIs differ little at data centers located geo- now, EC2 works only with
ware appliances, makes it from any other Xen-targeted graphically close to these 32-bit Linux operating sys-
very easy for a company to image.) companies’ intended audi- tems, although, eventually,
spawn one or more serv- A company could also ences, thereby minimizing any x86 or x86_64 could
ers for testing or produc- build Linux-VServers or networklatency issues. The run on EC2.
tion purposes in just a few OpenVZ—each of which virtualization management
minutes and then to discard allows for creating separate console maker Enomaly is Simple Storage Service
them back into the cloud operating system contain- pursuing this strategy with usersmaycreateimagesto
just as easily. ers within a host Linux its GeoElastic initiative. run on EC2 themselves and
We see a lot of poten- machine—andparlaya few The EC2 service costs packagethemupandupload
tial for the compute cloud EC2 instances into many 10 cents an hour, plus 20 them to Amazon.com’s
more virtual servers. cents per gigabyte of data servers using command-
37 Enomalism console What’s more, the EC2 transferred over the Inter- line EC2 tools. For images
manages Xen hypervisor approach opens the door to net. The VMs you run are you host yourself, you’ll
38 esxRanger provides geographicallyoriented VM the equivalent of servers incur costs for Amazon.
automated or on-demand deployments—in which with 1.7GHz x86 proces- com’s Simple Storage Ser-
backup of VMs companies would not only sors, 1.75GB of RAM, vice, or S3, to the tune of 15
spawn new instances to 160GB of local disk space [CONTINUED ON PAGE 36]
