I finally started using Amazon's EC2 yesterday. I've been meaning to learn it forever, but assumed it would be time-consuming to get registered, set up an instance, and so on.
Not true. Thursday morning at 10am, I registered for EC2. By 10:30 I had an instance of Drew Conway's Py/R AMI up and running, with several additional libraries installed, and a few GB of data I wanted to crunch uploaded to the server. Very fast turnaround.
Eight hours and $4.77 later, I'd crunched a lot of numbers -- by far my most productive workflow all week. Highly recommend it.
so that's quite the advert. For the uninitiated like me, what is the point of EC2? What can it do? (Should I pay $4.77 as well?)
ReplyDeleteEC2 is a cloud computing platform. Computers for rent. In my case, I just wanted to "check out" a high-powered computer to do some heavy number crunching for a day. Why buy a $2,000 PC if I only use it a few weeks out of the year? Other people rent whole grids of EC computers to handle spikes in web traffic, or other large, infrequent computational tasks.
ReplyDelete