Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service

RebornData writes "I receieved an e-mail this morning inviting me to participate in a limited beta of Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It's a grid computing service that allows you to create and upload your own Linux-based machine images and run them in Amazon's system, starting at $.10 per "instance hour" (each machine instance being equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM, and 160GB disk). You can use their tools to create and start new instances dynamically to meet whatever your particular capacity needs are at any given moment. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are explicitly supported, but any distro based on the 2.6 kernel should work. The service documentation provides more technical details. Unfortunately, it appears that the beta is limited to existing Amazon S3 users, and is already full."

Burstable Servers

At $.10 per hour, that makes a single server instance about $72 per month. If you have minimal storage needs, it can compete with a low end leased server, plus it has other advantages not present in the physical leased box world.

Personally I don't have any need for a scalable system such as this, but it certainly opens the possibility for products or projects that may not otherwise be feasible.

Have a CPU intensive batch job that can broken up and distributed? Use these boxes during the run then eliminate them when it's done. Only pay for the time you use.

At a previous job I had a task that would have been perfect for a burst-able cloud like this. Example:

Every evening we had a large number of scanned tiff images that needed to be manipulated, and a short time window in which to do it. Tiff image manipulation takes a lot of CPU resources and time. We ended up purchasing a bunch of blade servers that sat idle for the 22 hours a day they we not running images. Something like what Amazon is offering may have been a very high performance and cost effective solution to that type of problem. The control via web services could automate the whole process.

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I put idle machines to work on SETI@Home [berkeley.edu] (with permission of course).

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It seems like the only serious problem would be getting the 20GB TIFF (or 8 GBs of WAV files) over to the server instance in the first place.

Having to move all your data over to the server and back adds significant set-up overhead, particularly if you onl

Use Amazon S3

This service is paired with the Amazon S3 storage service, which has a high-bandwidth connection to the servers. Data transfer between EC2 and S3 is free.

-R

You're the grid computing poster child

I used to work on grid computing at a Japanese technology incubator. The project eventually got shelved because there were just not enough applications which honestly benefit from it when you consider the pain involved in programming the application to di

Re:You're the grid computing poster child

The downside, aside from the 100% solvable issue of being able to wake up 1,000 computers in the middle of the night without needing a staff of 80 (which was what it took for our "successful" run), is that programming for a grid is hard and tedious, and none of the frameworks that I am familiar with really take it down to the level where it needs to be for "regular" programmers to be able to do it.

You might want to check out Starfish [rufy.com]. It's Google's MapReduce implemented in Ruby, kind of. It makes distributed grid computing possible in six lines of code. Unbelievable, but true.

Ian

PS I've personally got nothing to do with Starfish. I read the author's blog--that's it.

I can already see it...

Compromised Amazon grid being used as a botnet to send spam. Letting people upload their own OS image is really asking for it.

Say...

Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

This isn't one of those wearable computers, is it? If so, I hope they're being very choosy about who they "let into the beta"... <shudder/>

Service Documentation?

Ok, so what is just me, or do the first to links on the post point to the exact same spot?
Maybe they meant the Technical Documentation [amazonwebservices.com]?

I use Gentoo...

Could I buy some server time to get my initial compile to under a week?

Elastic Grid computing?

what? So they are building computers for you and letting you use them for whatever you desire? Hmm. 0.10/hr thats $2.40/day. Thats $876/year. Not a bad deal. Heck its even cheaper than some website services that give you a dedicated server for $200/month.

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They are hardly building computers. They are using massive servers that are then virtualized to run thousands of desktop sized computers. I havn't RTFA but can anyone tell me if you can purchase a virtual image of greater stats than the 1.7GHz Xeon .. Or

Who uses this stuff?

This is the umpteenth grid service where anybody can buy huge gobs of computer time. The question is, is there really anybody out there who needs to do this and doesn't have their own hardware? Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

Re:Who uses this stuff?

Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

No, what if you need to do a one-off job. Which is cheaper $.10/hour or paying somebody full time, buying supplies, paying for labor to put it together, paying for power to run it, and then letting it sit there gathering dust.

There's no way you can get parts for the systems and labor for an admin to ~$72/month/server

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But who does one-off jobs? If you have the expertise to program this kind of massive computing project, you're going to employ that expertise continually.

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I wonder if there will eventually be a dependent subculture built around grids. Companies who sell pre-written (and customizable) solutions that require a grid to run. Companies might buy/license them and run them quarterly, to (say) update/analyze their

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Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?

You've got the economics wrong. Building your own cluster out of discarded PCs is not economic. Building your own cluster out of brand ne

You can also...

You can also go fart around with Amazon's Web Services [amazon.com] for fun and profit.

They rolled this out a few months back, when I was one of the brave few to sit through the presentation at a programmers conference in Santa Clara (for a free t-shirt and pen.) It

Great Pricing

I like their pricing a great deal. It's much, much, much cheaper than many of the alternatives (notable the Sun one) AND you do not have to build your apps to use some proprietary IPC that's no good outside of their cluster.

For example, lets say I had a MPICH (or even a custom) application that I wanted to run. I'm just some joe schoe, so I
can't use the cluster in my (academic) department. I can run my application for one hour using 1000 "computers" for about $100 USD.
That's pretty good. It would cost me $1000 to use the Sun N1 stuff AND I would have to use the N1 grid-engine to develop my app.

Can't wait to see what comes out of the Beta. People give Amazon a bad rap because they're not Google, but make no mistake: they are innovators too.

The great sea of resources.

The concept of virtualization is so seductive.

In our server room we have recently begun virtualizing servers and as a result have begun to think not in terms of physical servers and hard disks anymore, but in terms of resource pools of storage and processing.

It's like we have been able to smelt our physical machines and from the molten resources forge anew.

The recoverability and fault-tolerance is amazing as well - if a physical box dies there is basically no interruption in service. If something goes awry with an image we can just pull it and restore from yesterday.

Seeing Amazon offering what seems to be more of an ocean of resource than a pool is very tantilizing.

I'm certainly not the first, but I wonder if indeed local operating systems and cpus will become something of an anacronism, and that most processing will someday occur via the internet: that it will become the world-wide-mainframe.

Cost sheet

Pricing

        * Pay only for what you use.
        * $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
        * $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
        * $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Amazon S3 usage is billed separately from Amazon EC2; charges for each service will be billed at the end of the month.

(Amazon EC2 is sold by Amazon Web Services LLC.)

Virtual? Real? Or does it matter?

I'm surprised that Amazon isn't using any of the existing methods of creating virtual machine images, especially since it seems likely that they are using some sort of VM technology to do all of this. VMs are the easiest way to provide identical hardware

What a name!

Whoa!

"Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud."

Say it with me: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

For God's sake, it's like a Tom Wolfe [wikipedia.org] book!

Didnt SUN try this?

I remember when Sun's grid was out. I tried for days to get pricing, and eventually I was quoted something like $1000 per hour, except I couldnt get one hour.

I was trying out different parameter combinations in the uCLinux kernel to check compile sizes and

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Upload it as it's generated, so you aren't waiting until just before you run your batch to do the transfer all at once.