The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
1.
Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.
2.
Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
3.
Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
4.
Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries, and you may also directly access our SOAP or Query based APIs.
Think Sun's Grid computing, only cheaper, with virtualized machine images. I've got an immense project needing lots of CPU power and RAM but it should only last a few weeks if I do it right. This might be the ticket.
