I (as well as thousands of other people, I'm sure) got an email from Amazon inviting me to participate in their beta program for their Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Remember back when I wrote that Amazon's S3 was *the* killer app of 2006? Amazon is extending the shared model concept by allowing you to share computer cycles.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sold on this concept yet. I'm a pretty impatient guy, so unless I can see something within 20-30 minutes that I can wrap my head around, I'll usually give up.

I gave their documentation a read, and I'm not very impressed with this offering. In order for me to create an EC2 instance, I have to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Then I had to use the SOAP API to call it ... but the problem is that for stuff like Tabulas, I would *still* need machines to serve as the front-end, which means the only real benefit (for me) would be if I was running complex algorithms which cost a lot of cycles (which I'm not).

Although EC2 will probably find a use (academia and non-profits who need number crunching perhaps?), it is sort of a yawner... or maybe that's because I'm up at a ridiculously early time (for me) working...

The final verdict: Amazon EC2 is a *yawn* PASS.

Now when will somebody offer the S3 equivalent for mySQL hosting? *That* would be a total killer app - imagine if I never had to worry about backing up mySQL or slaving additional machines or scaling out as usage grew... I could simply drop in my data and have it there. Pay as you go mySQL hosting ... yummy!