Previously, in S3 re-pricing commentary, I wrote about the good news that Amazon’s EC2 service was hitting capacity limits.
Sun has built it, but will they come? talks about Sun’s lackluster sales with its utility computing effort.
I’m wondering why there is this disparity. In my opinion, there are two major differences between Sun and Amazon’s offerings:
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With Sun’s offering you need to port your program to Solaris.
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Sun’s costs a dollar an hour, Amazon’s costs 10 cents an hour.
I think the porting problem is a much bigger limitation and this bodes well for the workspace concept in grid computing. There is a similar problem with the big grids in that they usually expect scientists to port their code to a homogenous platform — this is sometimes a near-impossible proposition.
Nicholas Carr has commentary on Amazon’s S3 service here: Amazon re-prices S3.
One of the interesting things is the statement by Jeff Bezos that EC2 is “completely capacity-constrained” right now.
This is good news for workspaces and utility computing in general: people are buying into the VM-as-compute-capsule model in practice (workspaces are a lot like EC2, the biggest difference being the need for your own resources).
rPath Brings Amazon Web Services to Customers
It will work like this: software developers use rBuilder to build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Then, with a single click, rBuilder and rBuilder Online users can boot their software appliances on Amazon EC2.
If you’re currently in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) beta community, you and your peers can now benefit from a larger pool of pre-built Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) by sharing your AMIs with others. An AMI is a packaged environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot Amazon EC2 instances. The more AMIs are shared, the faster the community can innovate. After you’ve shared your image, advertise it to other developers in the Resource Center. We hope you’ll contribute yours!
Links:
Introduction to Sharing AMIs
Public AMIs
Amazon’s EC2 service runs on Xen. So ultimately you can grab ready to go VM images from other sources and use them on EC2 (only when you’re not remotely managing them on your own compute resources with the Virtual Workspace service, of course :-)).
There are good sources for many specialized images or base images (for customizing yourself) such as rBuilder and the VMware marketplace (VMware VMs can be converted to Xen images in most cases with an image copy and a little diligence).
rBuilder can deliver the built images directly to Amazon’s S3 service (where the EC2 images live as well), so I am hoping all of their appliances will be made available via the sharing options now available in the EC2 commandline interface.
