Amazon’s utility computing continues to advance

Still in it’s embryonic stage, cloud computing continues to advance. In enabling persistent storage to work in conjunction with it’s elastic cloud computing, Amazon is moving in on data center turf.

A few months ago I talked about our plans to offer a persistent storage feature for Amazon EC2. At that time I indicated that the service was in a limited alpha release with a small number of customers. Since then the alpha testers have been putting the service to good use and have provided us with a lot of very helpful feedback.

As of today, the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is now open and available to all EC2 users.

EBS gives you persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach to a running instance of EC2. You can format it and mount it as a file system, or you can access the raw storage directly. You can, of course, host a database on an EBS volume. In fact, Eric Hammond has already written an article, Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store.

EBS volumes can range in size from 1 GB to 1 TB. You can mount many of them on the same instance, and even stripe (aka RAID 0) your data across them to increase performance.

The volumes can be attached to any single instance within a single EC2 availability zone. They are also automatically replicated within the zone.

During the beta you can create up to 20 EBS volumes consuming a maximum of 20 TB of space. Before too long we’ll have a form to allow you to request more. (GigaOM)

Much of the future will be in the cloud, and it’s not all about hosted apps. Imagine an open source stack that will enable the cloud to be a data center, a web host, a server, a backup device, or ??? - all instantly scalable on demand and dirt cheap. The basic pieces are falling into place. Competition in the space is coming, along with more robust capabilities.