Three New Amazon Web Services (Only 3-4 Hours Old!)
As many of you know, I’m a huge supporter of Amazon Web Services. It is with great pleasure that I’ve stumbled onto their three new services: CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and AutoScaling.
CloudWatch “provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2”.
Elastic Load Balancing “automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances”.
AutoScaling “allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define.”
Thats three more strong tools in the Amazon toolchain, though prices are starting to add up for using their services. In a system with 10 EC2 instances, a single ELB adds <$20 per month, whereas CloudWatch will cost you an additional $108 per month. But, hey, at least AutoScaling is free (er, you pay for CloudWatch, and AutoScaling comes with it).
For the on-demand scalability offered, and the decreased barrier to entry for technopreneurs, I think this is a steal. Once you grow, it should be easy to transfer your recurring operating costs to capital costs, invest in some hardware, setup Eucalyptus, and move your apps onto your own cloud.
