NetworkWorld: Amazon last week released the beta of a compute cluster from which users can buy processing power for their Web-based applications.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also called Amazon EC2, is similar to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which makes storage capacity available to users in a grid-like fashion.
EC2 lets customers minimize the time it would take to obtain new servers and configure them. Customers can requisition machines and load custom applications on them, changing them as necessary. EC2 lets administrators create images that contain applications, libraries, data and configuration settings, so they can quickly configure servers. Special preconfigured images are also available.
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