test please delete

[NickFitz]

<nudges BI>

[BrowneIssue]

The record's st

SCHREEECHHHH!!!!!

[BrowneIssue]

<nudges BI>

Ooh, thank you for that.

I thought I'd be there all night.

[NickFitz]

SCHREEECHHHH!!!!!

Ooh, thank you for that.

I thought I'd be there all night.

NP

My custom EC2 machine image is being created... then I have to put it in one of my S3 buckets.

After that I can get to work implementing whatever I want, and run multiple instances of it as necessary

[NickFitz]

Spider is nearly into real time

[NickFitz]

Custom EC2 image now up and running

[BrowneIssue]

Custom EC2 image now up and running

what does that mean?

[NickFitz]

what does that mean?

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud: it allows you to create servers (which are actually virtual machines) running on Amazon's network. You can create your machine image, or customise an existing one, and then fire up as many instances of it as you want.

So if, for example, you have a complex task which would benefit from having a cluster of sixty specially-configured servers thrown at it, you just create your customised image, and fire up sixty copies of it. When they're done, you shut them down, and you only pay for the actual machine time you used.

It also means you can automatically scale against unusual loading: if you're running a web server and it starts getting hammered, just fire up a few more instances and load-balance across them. As and when the demand (slashdotting or whatever) dies down, shut down the extra ones. Thus you can scale to any level of demand, without having to do something silly like build your own datacenter

Example charges:

$0.10/hour - Small Instance (Default)

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon EC2.

[NickFitz]

Time to pop out to the Chinese, methinks

Back shortly

[NickFitz]

In the Chinese now