Cloud Computing Info

Have you been wondering what the differences between S3 and EBS are? I recently gave a high level overview of S3 and I plan to do one on EBS. I also plan to follow with a detailed looked at both S3 and EBS.

In the meantime, Cloudiquity has posted an entry, Differences between S3 and EBS. This is a nice overview. It provides some excellent technical details as well as some pricing info. Well worth a read.

LewisC

Technorati : amazon, aws, ebs, s3, storage

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Transient Storage

The storage that comes with an AMI is called Transient Storage. That means that when the instance is stopped, the storage goes away. Any data or files saved when the instance was running is lost. This is by design.

To persist your data between sessions, you have two options. During most of the beta period, the Simple Storage Service (S3) was the only internal method of persisting data. S3 cannot be mounted as file system so it served as a backup service only.

Shortly before the beta period ended, Amazon added the Elastic Block Store (EBS).

I am checking out some of the lesser known (to me at least) cloud computing providers. I ran across Flexiscale. It looks promising. It’s related to xcalibre, a web hosting provider. Flexiscale is run by the same people who founded xcalibre. It looks like it is run out of Scotland and the only pricing I can find is in pounds (and pence).

The sign up form is still working, as is the rest of the site. I wonder about their viability though as the latest blog entry is October 16, 2008. The only recent activity I can find in the forums is spam.