Filed under: Developer, Web services
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon
Amazon has just launched Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), a "Tier 0" service in the same vein as S3 (Simple Storage Service, launched earlier this year), but for processing power instead of storage. Amazon describes EC2 as "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud ... designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers." Developers can run anything they want on EC2--web servers, database servers, game servers, 3D renderers--though currently only Linux is supported. The way it works is this: You create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which contains your environment, programs, data, and so on and upload it to EC2 (or choose one of Amazon's "pre-configured, templated images), then use the EC2 web service to configure its security and network access. Then you can programatically "start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed" on the fly. According to Amazon, each instance "predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth," which is, well, a whole lot of power.For what you get, EC2 is fairly inexpensive, though that's to be expected having seen the pricing for S3. Here's the rundown:
- Pay only for what you use.
- $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
- $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
- $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).
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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
