Using EC2 as a playground

One of the neatest things about an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing model (like Amazon's EC2), is that you can use it as a playground in order to play with services and operating systems before you make a commitment.  This kind of thing used to be really hard to do as little as 10 years ago.  You needed to buy or find old hardware,  then install an OS (plus patches) and then you could play with it, and then repeat for a new OS.

Using EC2 as a playground is particularly helpful for playing with all the Linux variants.  A micro-instace on EC2 only cost pennies an hour (or about $20 a month if you keep in running 24/7), and you can install all sorts of linux OS's on it.  In the last few weeks our team has tried out Ubuntu server, Fedora 14, CentOS, and the new Amazon Linux AMI.  Pretty cool.  Our beta systems are currently running on Fedora,  but at some point we are going to migrate to the Amazon Linux AMI.  We spent lots of time trying them out before deciding,  and we could do it on the cheap without having to worry about installs and such.

Testing out Amazon Web Service's platform products has been very neat also. Again, since you are only paying for what you use, it can be done economically.  We have tested and are currently integrating S3, but are also testing and considering integrating Elastic Load Balancing and RDS.

The interesting trend here is the commoditization of platform and infrastructure, which allows engineering teams to leverage the commodity pricing in order to build better and more flexible applications.  This trend also puts the value of a software product squarely back on the intellectual property, as it should be, and not on the infrastructure, where it does not belong - but that is a subject for another post.