Amazon Elastic Cloud

[Mad Mel]

...any body use it?

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

I have a few processes at work which require pretty large-scale processing power over short durations. Things like air modeling, and rendering thousands of still frames for animations. Seems logical to rent space rather than buying a dozen high-powered machines.

If anyone has used EC2, I'd appreciate their thoughts on it's usability, and any drawbacks they've run across.

Cheers,
Mel

[photon]

I have a few guys I know that use it, though not for quite as heavy a usage as you are describing, but they have been very pleased with it. They say it's very easy to use and quite good price wise.

I don't use it though so I can't give any personal experience.

[photon]

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

Rackspace is another provider.

[Mad Mel]

Out of curiousity, have you ever considered something like this for hosting the board? Or does it become too expensive to get the capacity you need?

I rent a virtual server at a local ISP (rather than us having to put in place a proper extranet), and it's working well for us. It's not a proper cloud, in that I can't just add and remove capacity on demand, but it's an easy way for us to get web apps out to our clients.

[photon]

Yeah we checked it out, the cost would have just been too much monthly. Rackspace's cloud one was really intriguing though, but the monthly costs were significantly higher than what we're paying now.

[Mad Mel]

Ah, I see. Hopefully the trend continues and the prices keep falling, at least it gives you options the next time around.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by photon

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

Rackspace is another provider.

I've heard testimony from people who moved from Amazon's cloud onto Rackspace that it cost 30% less and delivered more then 500% more service/performance.