DISQUS

rycoleman · 1 year ago

Very interesting indeed Matt - what Amazon has put together has really made a lot of new web-based companies possible. Before, when you wanted to do an ASP or SaaS model company you needed a hefty bankroll to buy the servers you needed.

Not it literally costs you pennies. At AmazonCamp a few weeks ago the AideRSS guys gave a perfect example. On the day they launched they had 10 "servers" running. Through the course of the day they had to turn on 20, then 30. By the end of the 24 hour they had 100 instances of EC2 running to handle the load. Each server costs roughly $2.40 to run for a 24 hour period. Before Cloud Computing they a) never could have afforded it and b) even if they could have afforded it never could have scaled that fast.With real boxes you're looking at days or weeks to bring 100 servers online...

FWIW - This is more like the fifth leg. Amazon also has SQS (Message Queues - geeky but important) and FPS (Flexible Payment System) in their repertoire...

- Ryan

mathewi · 1 year ago

That's fascinating, Ryan -- it will be interesting to see what other
kinds of businesses or applications come on the scene over the next
little while, powered by an infrastructure that's almost entirely
virtual.

And thanks for mentioning the FPS, I'd forgotten about that one (and
didn't even know about the other one)

BobWarfield · 1 year ago

"Amazon has gone ahead and done it."

I too much prefer this approach to all the hype that has surrounded Google and some others on their platforms. This is but one shot fired, but it is an important one. There's a lot more to come:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/to-r...