Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud):-

Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud):-

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2", is a commercial web service which allows paying customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which customers can request an arbitrary number of Virtual Machines, i.e. server instances, on which they can load any software of their choice. Current users are able to create, launch, and terminate server instances on demand, hence the term "elastic". The Amazon implementation allows server instances to be created in zones that are insulated from correlated failures. EC2 is one of several Web Services provided by Amazon.com under the blanket term Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom dons However, there are two commercial utility computing solutions based on virtualization that are more than a year old now

Virtual machines

EC2 uses Xen virtualization. Each virtual machine, called an instance, is a virtual private server and can be one of three sizes; small, large or extra large. Instances are sized based on EC2 Compute Units which is the equivalent CPU capacity of physical hardware.

One EC2 Compute Unit equals 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. The three available Instance sizes are sized as follows:

1. Small Instance (Default)

· Processor: 1.2 Ghz Opteron or the Xeon

· Platform:32 bit

· RAM:1.6 GB

· Harddisk:160GB

2. Large Instance

· Processor: 1.2 Ghz Opteron or the Xeon

· Platform:64 bit

· RAM:7.5 GB

· Harddisk:850GB

3. Extra Large Instance

· Processor: 1.2 Ghz Opteron or the Xeon

· Platform: 64bit

· RAM: 15 GB

· Harddisk: 1690GB

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

High-CPU Medium Instance Instances of this family have the following configuration:

·            1.7 GB of memory

·                5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)

·                350 GB of instance storage

·                32-bit platform

·                I/O Performance: Moderate

High-CPU Extra Large Instance Instances of this family have the following configuration:

·                7 GB of memory

·                20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)

·                1690 GB of instance storage

·                64-bit platform

·                I/O Performance: High