Amazon EC2/S3 Services

[AgaBoogaBoo]

This seems like the right forum to post in, but thought I'd see if any of you have looked into these options and if so, what you think about them. They look pretty interesting to me and think that S3 might be an easy way to keep backups of files on computers in a remote location.

Anyone here use either? Anyone looked into either? Thoughts/comments on it?

 

[mundane]

We might be looking into their service as well, depends on ITAR compliance.

 

[Argo]

I've used S3 and I like it. EC2 still in Beta though, AFAIK.

 

[George P Burdell]

I started looking into S3 after reading about Smugmug. Until now, I've only used it as a backup solution.

EC2 is an excellent solution for applications looking to scale out. The fact that you can make a custom server image and have n instances running within minutes with a single API call is useful when your app is scaling up/down. But the main drawback is the fact that HDD data is not preserved over reboots. This makes it a poor candidate for database servers, among other things. I'm on the waiting list and haven't tried it out yet, but on the whole, EC2 looks promising. I'll wait and watch until it goes out of beta and serves a much higher load than what it is serving now.