Dev Blog

Recently Amazon introduced the ability to buy instance hours on a ’spot’ market. Rather than try to describe the service myself, here is the description from the spot instances help page:
Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply […]

[Update - April 16th 2010] As of April 15th 2010 the version ClamAV used as the the virus scan agent in the mail server built using these instruction will nolonger update the virus database which means the virus scanner will no run and causes the mailserver to defer send emails. As a result the […]

Of course it wouldn’t be very British to be unequivocally positive about something (see the last post on AWS) so here’s a bit of a gripe about Windows on EC2 so I can remain in character.  But there’s a solution here as well.
EC2 instances of any flavor are not much use without persistent storage and […]

Well that could be the whole review.  I’ve been using AWS for a couple of years and really wanted to use their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service when it became available.  The machines available initially were all Linux.  I don’t mind Linux and we use it to run routers and the telephone system but the stuff […]

So EC2 has a role especially if the software you want to use runs on Linux.  You can scale quickly and coordinate activity between a farm of machines using SQS.  But if your software doesn’t run on Linux you’re stuffed.
 The principle of EC2 is great because you pay for what you need.  Need an extra […]

It’s interesting to hear that IBM and Google shared a platform where the respective CEOs Schmidt and Parsimonious talked about cloud computing (though there’s nothing tangible to show for their efforts so far, not even a roadmap or a sniff of vaporware).Â
Meanwhile Amazon’s EC2 continues to amaze me and its becoming more and more robust but there’s […]

I’ve been participating in the EC2 beta program for the past 18 months because the ability to fire up any number of PCs seems like such a good idea.  And kudos to Amazon for investing in a speculative area like this.Â
EC2 provides the means to start any number of virtual machines running one or another versions […]