Can someone explain Amazon EC2 service for me? In Layman terms? :)

I'll give it a shot, Peter.

When you offer a computer service through the Internet, your customers, buyers, prospects, etc. use their own computers, and the Internet lets their computers connect with your computer.

These clients might have several pieces of computer equipment at your home or office. It's possible to make a diagram:


"The Internet" includes lots of different equipment owned and operated by many different companies and organizations. We could try to make a diagram that includes all the components, but it might run to many pages. Instead of trying to represent all of these pieces, network diagrams just use a big cloud to represent the Internet. Like a drop of water goes into a cloud, and some time later falls back out of the cloud, we don't need to trace the individual paths of each data packet in the Internet.



In this example, where information goes after the cable modem connects to the Internet is just "one big cloud."

Traditionally when you offer data services over the Internet, you use a particular machine as your server. You have to be responsible to buy the server or rent it by the month, configure it, manage it, and distribute traffic if your load requires more than one server.


Amazon is one of several companies that created this kind of data center for their own business.

"Cloud computing" means that you get to use a portion of their data center, on a "pay as you go" basis, without having to set it up or manage it. With EC2, you simply decide how many server machines you want to use and when you want to use them. You pay as you go, with a charge per server per hour, only when you use it. (If you fund your account with prepayment, you get a discount on the hourly rate.)

If you have a product launch and want two hundred servers but for just one day, no problem. If you need a few extra servers for a week, no problem. If you want to start with one server and have Amazon duplicate your setup as your business grows, no problem. If you don't know yet how many servers you'll require, no problem. If you want to have Amazon monitor your servers and add or remove additional servers based on your level of traffic, no problem.

From the point of view of your business, "the cloud" includes the Internet and also Amazon's data center. Amazon's part of "the cloud" is big enough to guarantee rain, without your need to track the flow of traffic to servers that you have to set up.

Does this make sense?

Chris

It is probably easier to just say that they are selling computing power rather than data storage and bandwidth as are sold with their S3 service.

Do you remember the SETI@HOME screen saver? The SETI folks wrote a screen saver that if you installed it would receive data packets from them and "analyze" them. They would use your computing power. By getting the screen saver on thousands of computers, they ended up with the computing power of a super computer by using a large number of personal computers.

This is the same thing in reverse. Do you have a computing task that would normally take a supercomputer to process? You can use this service. Even better, do you have a computing task that only happens on a sporadic basis, but it would cost you $50,000 in servers to process that task that only happens every few days? That is an even better application for the Amazon service since you only pay for the computing, not the servers that sit idle when you don't need them. Others pay to use that computing power when you aren't using it.

Thanks guys. This really helped.

Let me get this straight then. to put it into an example, let's say that I need more bandwith/resources for my website hosting.

If I incorporate Amazon EC2 service, I could keep my own web hosting and if I get a big spike in the traffic, then amazon cloud would take over and allow me to receive that traffic without crashing my servers?

If that's the case, do I still keep my old website hosting company and just tell amazon EC2 what site is it or server? I mean, I don't have to switch hosts or anything like that right?

Basically, amazon ec2 can be used for 'emergency' type of services like spikes in traffic during launches or anything along those lines. Am I correct?

Thanks,

Peter

Yes, you are correct.

My company has actually used this on several occasions for exactly what you're talking about. We expect a big spike in traffic coming, so we launch a few instances of our site on EC2 servers and add them to a load balancer. Then, when the traffic hits, the load balancer levels out the load between the normal host and EC2 instances.

Works like a champ!

PS: The great thing is, when you're traffic drops off you can shutdown the EC2 instances and don't have to pay for them anymore. That's why it's called on-demand computing. Use it when you need it, don't pay for it when you don't need it.