Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
EC2 let’s you load an arbitrary number of OS images known as AMI’s (Amazon Machine Image is a configured Linux distro ready to run your application) and then get charged for the number of CPU hours required to complete your processing. Oh, this is something to watch. It’ll be very interesting to see how companies that currently only offer per-cpu licensing react to this; perhaps per-cpu-hour licensing or now could they easily flip the model inside out and easily sell their software as a service?
[...] year I was just observing the revolution when I spoke of inverting the CPU model into a rented hourly service for machine [...]