Under The Radar has an interesting post about overcoming EC2’s weaknesses, dynamic IP addressing and 24×7 operations.  The folks at WeoGeo have designed an application called WeoCEO that supposedly addresses these issues.  I think this is a very exciting development, especially when combined with the ability to use S3 as a file system.

The hype about EC2 is that it enables people to ‘rent-a-cloud’, paying for and using as many or as few servers as they wish at any given time.  The problem is that currently these servers are limited in ways that seem minor until you start working with them on practical matters.  This is really visible when working with data and databases on EC2, essentially you have to either change either your tools or your paradigm.  The problem then becomes one of economics, where you try to balance the savings from renting a server and storage against the cost of solving a problem with tools that require a lot of customization.
I would love to be a part of the WeoCEO beta, and see how things work along with S3Infinidisk.  If the problems of addresssing and persistence are solved, then we truly have the ability to scale easily without large-scale customization.  Taking care of these is a giant leap forward, and will help EC2 truly live up to the hype that it has generated in the developer community.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 6:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Over the Horizon, Enterprise Web, AWS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.