Amazon EC2 - New Server Capacities

Amazon announced today that EC2 now offers three different server capacities.  For the uninitiated, the significance of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) is that it provides virtual computers on the Internet which one can operate via web services APIs for utility computing, and the computer can run an OS image with everything you want on it.

So you can create a Linux/Apache/PHP machine as your web server and a Linux/MySQL as your DB server, all just by clicks and API calls - and you can create as many as you want, and shut them down or boot them up any time you want.  Last but not least, EC2 server images can use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage System) distributed storage.

EC2/S3 is something to watch, not only from a technology standpoint being a real, in-production, fully virtual and distributed computing environment, but also from a business standpoint.  EC2/S3 creates a totally new pay-as-you-need approach to data servers, which makes it a lot more easier for startups to build their infrastructure with little money and then scale it up as they move forward.

The new server (or per EC2 terminology, image) capacities makes EC2 more flexible in terms of architecting a solution (e.g., heavy hitter machine for DB, lighter for web servers), or special applications (e.g., video processing, genetic applications).