ZDNet (Dan Farber) writes:
Call it “utility computing” or “Web-scale computing” or “on-demand infrastructure.” Whatever the case, Amazon is hoping that its new EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloudwhy not just S4?) Web service (in the larger sense, as both an interface and an on demand platform) will turn into a big business. In effect, Amazon is leveraging its massive infrastructure investment, providing it as a publically facing service for a variety of applications, first with S3 and now adding the server component.
I talked to Peter Desantis, director of EC2 about the target market for the service. “EC2 is aimed at developerseveryone from the developer in a dorm room rapid prototyping and wanting access to highly scalable computing capacity to see if an algorithm scales to 1,000 node to the fledgling startup without capital to pre-buy capacity for a spike that may happen or the established company looking for a novel way to increase flexibility of using computation or storage and to reduce cost,” he said.
