
525Virtualizing Resources for the Cloud
16.9 CASE STUDY: AMAZON ELASTIC COMPUTE CLOUD
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a vital part of Amazon’s cloud
computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). On August 25, 2006 Amazon
launched EC2, which together with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),
marked the change in the way IT was done. Amazon EC2 is a highly reliable and
scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with a utility payment model. It allows
users to rent virtual machines (VMs) and pay for the resources that they actually
consume. Users can set up and congure everything in their VMs, ranging from
the operating sy ...