Amazon Announces Persistent Storage in EC2

 There are two things that have prevented me from using Amazon’s Web Services in the technology I’ve been building - and Amazon just announced the solution for one of them!  Jeff Barr just announced on the AWS blog that they are going to be releasing persistent storage within EC2 which is their computing cloud.  Why is this important and what does it mean?  I’m sure there are lots of innovative ways that this will be used, but the main reason I haven’t used EC2 to this point is there are two things I need from it – one is the ability to use MySQL databases in their cloud.  It wasn’t feasible before but now they’ve made it so you’ll be able to load up a virtual machine with MySQL installed on it and bam! it will map to your persistent storage!  Finally!  You can now use databases easily within EC2.  Combined with their Elastic IP Addresses I’ll be able to address my databases on EC2 with an IP address and the whole database system will be able to scale. 

This is huge!  Amazon is killing in the compute cloud environment.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t a production announcement – it’s coming out sometime this year – but at least it’s coming! 

Now, if they would just get Windows 2003 working as the operating system I won’t need to buy $150,000.00 worth of servers this year!

Be sure to read Jeff’s full announcement here