Good news from the Amazon EC2 team. On their Developer Connection Forum, they have just announced that EC2 is now open to all, which is cool, and they now have a total of 3 instance types:

  • Small: which is the standard 1.7Gb memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (more on that later) and 160Gb hdd. this is 32bit only, and still goes for 10c per hour.
  • Large: 7.5Gb RAM, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 compute units each), 850Gb storage and 64bit processing. this goes for 40c per hour.
  • Extra Large: 15Gb memory, 8 EC2 compute cores (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 compute units each), 1680Gb storage and 64 bit processing. price: 80c per hour.

But, i hear you ask, what is a EC2 Compute Unit? Amazon has info here. Originally, they said it was a 1.7Gz Xeon. but as they say in their documentation, its a 1.7Gz early 2006 Xeon. now, they say, its the equivalent of a 1-1.2Gz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon.

So, this is pretty cool. the opening of EC2 will hopefully get more people working on it, and might get Amazon to add a SLA to it like they just did to S3. It may also push them to get some sort of EC2->S3 bridge which auto backs up instances.

[update] AWB Blog has a bit more on this.

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