Amazon announced the beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) today; it’s pretty exciting. The basic premise of the service is that you can get any number of virtual machines and pay for what you use as far as the number of machines, disk space and bandwith go. I’m absolutely bursting with different ways to use this technology, from web hosting to streaming radio to batch processing to QA.
I signed up for an Amazon Web Services account today, hoping to play, even if only a little, with EC2, but the beta is full already. I am, however, on the list of people waiting for spots, and I’ll still have a chance to play with S3 (which I wrote about, if a bit tangentially, in the context of JungleDisk) in the mean time. Cool stuff is coming out of Amazon, cool stuff.