Amazon EC2 is a hyped technology that is actually exceeding it's expectations. It's cloud computing, and when Amazon added recent features to enable datacenter level fail-over and cluster tools, it became the best way to scale any large internet service.
It now has over 60,000 customers, some using thousands of instances of virtual hardware. Combined, they use more bandwidth than all of Amazon.com. Companies like RightScale are examples of a blossoming 3rd party support and service eco-system growing around EC2.
Google is attempting to do something similar with Google App Engine, and Sun and IBM have cloud models as well.
But Amazon EC2 doesn't do Windows. You can't run the Windows stack on it (at least in any real way). You can run Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and almost any other Unix you can name. But no Windows. Windows is gonna fall further behind as the internet infrastructure shifts to cloud models.
Windows isn't Cloudy.
¶ 5/21/2008
Update: The new URL is http://searchaprime.com. Amazon asked me to not use "amazon" in the URL.
I rewrote searchamazonprime.com to make it better. It's designed to find products on Amazon.com that are eligible for Amazon Prime free shipping. To do this, it finds only products sold by Amazon.
The new site is redesigned to look better, and the back-end is much faster than the old one.
Search results for Amazon Prime products related to "grand theft auto". The horizontal blue bars separate categories of results, i.e. "Video Games" vs "Books" vs "Music". By clicking on the blue bars, you can hide or expand each category.
I've also added some nice features. It finds many more products than any other Amazon search site that I know of, and it shows them on one page.
There are sections of results by category, and you can hide categories you don't care about.
I wrote a spelling suggestion corrector based on product names. So now when you type in a misspelling or a typo, you get a suggested correction, like on Google.
Get Auto-complete for Amazon Prime searches, by adding searchamazonprime to your Firefox search toolbar.
Finally, you can now add searchamazonprime to your Firefox search bar. If you use the search bar in Firefox, you will get auto-completion style suggestions as you search.
It's really easy - and there's step-by-step instructions here.
So if you have Amazon Prime, or buy a lot of stuff from Amazon.com, try it out, and let me know what you think.
¶ 5/05/2008
I've been planning to mess with Google App pretty soon.
This dude ported the Google App Engine SDK to Amazon EC2.
No question that Amazon EC2 is the thing you'd actually use to do anything real, but while Google's price is free (for now), it might be fun to mess with.
Update: Re-reading this post, I realize it'd be much more productive to spend time experimenting with Amazon EC2 more, and really develop something valuable on it. It can do everything Google App Engine can do, and a lot more. It's an open garden for production apps, while Google's is much more closed toy playground. I probably shouldn't get distracted by Google's.
¶ 4/14/2008
