http://live.pirillo.com/ – Most people don’t realize that Amazon has been a pioneer in the web services frontier: they have services which developers can interact with to help develop applications.

S3 – the Simple Storage Service – is an expandable storage service which allows other websites to offload their storage needs to S3. So, websites can store images, videos, and other files which cost a large amount of money to store and transmit this data.

EC2 – the Elastic Computing Cloud – allows websites to offload computing needs, rather than storage needs. So, if your website gets posted to Digg, the spike in traffic can be accommodated, rather than slowing to a crawl due to a lack of computing power.

While both S3 and EC2 provide different features to developers, they offer the same basic service: being able to augment costly services (bandwidth, storage, and computing cycles) at a "pay as you need it" rate.

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Amazon Web Services

Don’t ask me what I’m doing up at 3am – but I’ve gotta tell you about an email I just received from AWS (Amazon Web Services). The message didn’t say that I was under embargo, so…

This is a short note to let you know about a limited beta of our newest web service: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Since the beta will be very limited, we’re only e-mailing a select group of developers at this point who have been making Amazon Web Services requests in the past month.

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.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2′s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

At this stage, we’re only accepting a limited number of beta customers, so if you’re interested in Amazon EC2, we recommend you move fast. If you find that our beta is full by the time you sign up, please accept our apologies and stay ready. As soon as we can accommodate more participants, we will e-mail those of you who have given us your e-mail addresses and you’ll have another chance to try Amazon EC2…

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2