Amazon EC2+S3+PS - The Next Shared Hosting Environment?
Amazon made history two years ago by diving head first into the new realm of cloud computing. Their popular Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 for short) allows users to provision servers at will, allowing them (in theory) to scale their web company on demand.
The main limitation of Amazon’s offering is that it doesn’t really include any usable persistent storage. If your EC2 instance dies a horrible death, all the data that was with it dies as well. You can, of course, using their S3 service to make backups of some of your data, but it’s really not meant to be used like a fast-access disk drive.
Amazon has recently announced that they are in the middle of developing a persistent storage (PS) solution for their cloud offering. What that means is that when your instance barfs, you’ll be able to bring it back up without losing any of the data that was stored on the persistent drive.
With that new offering, it suddenly becomes realistic for someone to set up a complete web hosting company on Amazon EC2. If the demand suddenly spikes, the hosting company could simply fire up a few more EC2 instances to handle the extra load. When the traffic dies down, they could free those instances to save money.
There are obvious technical hurdles to that approach, but it’s definitely possible. We’ll see how things look in a few months.