New Amazon EC2 Micro Instances

To make this article more comprehendible it is important for us to know what Amazon EC2 does. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 in short, is essentially a web service that enables flexibility in resizing the compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 functions as a sub-brand of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which caters to companies’ requirements of an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud that is available in a plethora of sizes.

Amazon Web Services has always boasted about the fact that its solutions deliver various benefits to its IT clientele like cost effectiveness, authenticity, flexibility (adaptability), etc. In order to continue its trend of servicing clients with the most flexible, reasonably priced and reliable solutions AWS has now announced the all new Amazon EC2 Micro Instances. The addition of the new Micro Instance would promise users to incur low costs, and utilize the instance for their lower throughput applications and web sites.

Companies most often host their applications and web services in the cloud and this is an ideal route that is taken, thereby reducing several hardware predicaments. However, Cloud Computing is considered sort of a costly affair. Now, with the launch of Micro Instances as a new feature, cloud hosting on AWS becomes technologically simpler and much cheaper than earlier. Though, it is still in its testing and development phase of being used by small entrepreneurs and small development projects, the idea is for it to grow into something big - big enough to capture a large portion of clients.

The cost start from

Other than the price being as cheap as this, there does not seem anything new in the product technically. According to aws.amazon.com, “Micro Instance 613MB of memory, up to 2 ECUs (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform.” Apparently, the claim by AWS is that a product like this was in demanded by most of its clients, wherein the requirement was of a low priced instance that could enable the optimization of less demanding and lower throughput type applications and at the same time take in as much compute cycles as possible, at regular intervals.

It is more evident that Micro Instance is tailor-made for low traffic applications (tens of requests per minute). But business-wise it is a brilliant strategy employed by Amazon to lure clients into using its infamous Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and also relish the added advantage of the Micro Instance.