Tech Stuff

As I have been playing around with EC2 one of things that seemed to be missing were bigger instances with more CPU and memory. Amazon describes their base instance as “One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.” and has 1.7GB of RAM. That works really well in most cases, but I was wanting to see something a little bigger for a MySQL database machine . Amazon rolled out some larger instance types just recently that seem to fit the need.

I have been following Amazon’s EC2 system for a couple months now. Been looking for an excuse to try it out. Now that Agent Scoreboard is live I needed to find a new Linux server to develop on and figured this would be the perfect project. If you haven’t heard of EC2 before it is a great concept. You pay for the processing and bandwidth that you need. For instance if you need a server for just a couple hours to test some new software or do some computing you can spin one of for those couple hours and then shut it down when you are finished. No setup charges, just $0.10 an hour per instance plus bandwidth. This is perfect for sites where they may need a couple extra web or database servers running for a couple hours during their peak times. You can choose from a basic Linux install, customize a basic one and store it for later use or upload an image from your own Linux box.