EC2 Icon

Summary

Amazon service that allows you to provision and configure your own servers.

Overview

Main Website aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Experience Very Cool
Cost Not Bad at All

Notes

  • This is the service that convinced me that this "cloud computing thing" might be kinda cool.
  • Getting access to even a small virtual server for testing or developing can be a challenge in an organization. You need to get approval, answer questions about capacity and privileges that you can often only guess at, wait for an admin to create your environment then spend time and energy in a back-and-forth with the admin trying to get privileges you need for your application
  • With EC2, in a matter of seconds, you have a (virtual) box and full control over that box.
  • Don't like that server, stop it, terminate it and launch a new one.
  • This is a paid service but the cost for EC2 is surprising low.