Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)

Got it!

If you are not familiar with the offering, check this out.

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).

Who needs it?

Lets say you are developing a custom content management system for a photo editor. Raw images from today's cameras run about 5 - 15 megs. Lets plan ahead and assume 25 megs so we get an even 40 per gig. It would be easy to shoot 400 gigs of photos in a year or two & the required disk drive would cost $250 & then you would need reduncancy and backup & all of a sudden $1,000 in fixed costs plus co-hosting fee. It adds up. Finally you could be sure that your bargan basement ISP would not be able to restore your backups when you really needed them any way.

Enter the cloud

400 gigs of storage will cost $40 per month.
Working with 10 images per hour, 10 hours a day would require about 2.5 gigs of traffic at $ .20 each. Fifty cents. $15/month.

Plus: No IT department