Introducing EC2!

Remember the never ending hassles of a long and tedious procurement process? All that time you spent waiting for a brand new server to show up at your doorstep so that you could get started on it? Something we all as sysadmins have gone through. Well, that all changed on August 25, 2006 when Amazon released the first beta version of one of its flagship service offerings called the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2.

EC2 is a service that basically provides scalable compute capacity on an on-demand, pay-per-use basis to its end users. Let's break it up a bit to understand the terms a bit better. To start with, EC2 is all about server virtualization! And with server virtualization, we get a virtually unlimited capacity of virtual machines or, as AWS calls it, instances. Users can dynamically spin up these instances, as and when required, perform their activity on them, and then shut down the same while getting billed only for the resources they consume.

EC2 is also a highly scalable...