IT Weather Forecast: Clouds Ahead

Three cool bits of news came out of Amazon this week. (Fair disclosure, one of these has a high degree of self interest on my part.)

First, Amazon opened up the Elastic Compute Cloud to all comers. Open registration now exists for getting 10 Cents per hour computing infrastructure. It is great for quick set up, test and tear down. Open sign-ups are here.

Second, Amazon now has "big" instance types. Instances in the EC2 cloud (what we at CohesiveFT call Elastic Servers(tm), now come in different sizes, going as big as 15 gig of memory and 4 "virtual" cores. Good stuff for the EC2 early adopters who have been memory and compute bound.

Third, we are thrilled that AWS evangelist Jeff Barr blogged about our Elastic Server On-Demand. Since his post yesterday many hundreds of people have hit our demo video and new requests for access to our private beta are surging in.

Clouds. EC2 is a great example of how smooth the provisioning, deployment and management of infrastructure can be. At CFT we think Amazon is blazing a trail that other large scale, retail-oriented, information provides will follow. Keep yours eyes open for GoogleCloud, EbayCloud and more to follow.