Amazon's EC2 Beta List Fills Quickly

Amazon's Web Services team sent out an email invite for the Elastic Compute Cloud Beta on Thursday at 3:00 a.m. PDT, and within the first few hours, the initial beta list was already filled.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon's latest web service, which provides on-demand, resizable computing. The press release described the specs: "the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth." Pricing is $0.10/instance-hour, $0.20/GB for data transfers, and $0.15/GB per month for storage (on Amazon's S3).

Judging by the beta popularity, this price/performance ratio seems to have hit the sweet spot. It will be interesting to see how the other major players in the on-demand market such as IBM, Sun, and HP, react to Amazon's new offering.

Posted by John Dorsey at 02:27 PM  Permalink