Thursday, August 31, 2006

Amazon's Rent-A-Grid in Beta

While everybody is busy with what they do, Amazon.com has started rolling out a grid service, an extension to it's S3 service released on March this year. It is called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of local disk. The bandwidth is extra, billed separately at the S3 rate of 20 cents per gigabyte. So for now, it is pricier than some dedicated hosting providers. As the serviceÂ’s name suggests, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2 is the only game in town.
Or is it?
3Tera's AppLogic grid system, is a kissing cousin to EC2, but with a more sophisticated approach to configuring and managing bundles of Linux applications along with other so-called virtual appliances that encapsulate firewalls and load balancers. The AppLogic management console is a slick AJAX application that you use to wire up collections of these virtual appliances and clone them for reuse.
So the Grid and Grid Technology is becoming a part of everyday technology and perhaps people will go back to using terminals, of course more sophisticated terminals than tose I had connected to IBM mainframes.

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