So Amazon (Web Services) has a service called EC2, which is essentially their hosting service. Due to some stuff I’m working on at work, I have been taking a look at what kinds of service automation are possible, and that led me to look at EC2.

So the first thing that is interesting to me is that their hosting model is based *entirely* on usage of their resources. Which, I mean, that makes sense, right? Assuming you can commoditize all the pieces of it in some kind of meaningful way. Storage, CPU, RAM, etc… assuming you can assign per minute/hour/day kinds of numbers to that. And if you aren’t running some kind of major site that gets monstrous hits or requires huge storage, I can see this model being VERY attractive.

I’m making an attempt to map some of the websites I have to this sort of model, and see what might make sense to move over to that.

Further reading on the subject shows the possibility of using their S3 storage buckets for static websites as well. There is a huge community and effort among tech folks to use this sort of solution. All kinds of little mini-projects and products being developed to take things that would normally be very dynamic content (like say, this blog), and host it in a static form. It removes a HUGE amount of overhead with all the blog software and CPU intensive stuff if you can swing it.

That reading also led me down the road of website optimization. Wow. So I’ve been living under a rock for a few years, apparently.

Long story short: I’m going to be throwing up some blog posts describing and/or documenting some of my travels down the road of using EC2 with some of the above goals. We’ll see what comes of it.

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