Inside Amazon’s EC2

ZDNet’s Dan Farber writes:

I talked to Peter Desantis, director of EC2 about the target market for the service. “EC2 is aimed at developers–everyone from the developer in a dorm room rapid prototyping and wanting access to highly scalable computing capacity to see if an algorithm scales to 1,000 node to the fledgling startup without capital to pre-buy capacity for a spike that may happen or the established company looking for a novel way to increase flexibility of using computation or storage and to reduce cost,” he said.

The service is designed for real-time Web applications, providing the ability to rapidly provision large amounts of compute capacity, configuring it and paying for it as you need it, Desantis said. EC2 can also be used for traditional batch and data-intensive applications, but customers would need to provision a grid framework on on top of it. “If patterns develop for grid computing, we or anyone else could institutionalize it,” Desantis said. “A primary design goal was to be flexibile. We have chosen not to provide a constrained application processing framework. We allow developers to run the software they want to run, and to take advantage of the near-instantaneous provisioning and pay-as-you-go pricing.