Amazon plugs in to grid rental

CONSIDERING JUST HOW quiet Sun has gone over its compute grid, it may or may not be timely for Amazon.com to launch its own offering.

The good news for the Amazonians is that with Sun's grid marketing machine in quiet mode, it can get bragging rights on the principle for a while. The bad news is that it's not at all clear whether there's any dough to be made with this model.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) might sound like an album by the late Syd Barrett, but it is in fact a web-based processing environment for developers that is designed to complement the S3 storage service. Together the services offer a datacentre in the sky if you like.

As with the Sun Grid Compute Utility, the boast is that you only pay for the processing cycles you use and, of course, you don't have to buy the servers cash on the nail.

Amazon pricing looks very competitive at 10 US cents per hour for each instance used and 20 cents per gig of internet traffic but the service is limited to Linux for now. Also, it's in controlled beta testing at present.

The Sun Grid had a protracted gestation period and suffered an embarrassing meltdown when it finally went live in March. Thanks to a legal mulligatawny, there is still no access to the Sun grid for users outside the US.

If Sun is pulling up any trees with its Grid, it's doing so on the QT. Even CEO Jonathan Schwartz has only mentioned the G word once since 31 May on his blog, although to be fair there are a few testimonials on its Grid site.

A few months ago Sun launched a competition to design grid apps. The closing date for that comes at the end of this month so we look forward to seeing what devotees of the Sunsters come up with. µ