I was introduced to Amazon EC2 by a friend who gave me early access to Amazon cloud infrastructure before it was launched publicly. Then Amazon announced a limited public beta on Aug 25 2006 (We used to read DDJ, then) and I got my personal account and have been hooked since then. While doing Tejit, I ran a crawler farm with an early implementation of Map-Reduce along with an NLP engine on EC2. At it’s peak, I had around a dozen instances wired via the Simple Queuing Service for job propagation. I discovered SQS by chance, while struggling with a Java-RMI based implementation for crawler job assignments.
If I remember it correctly, there was only one instance during launch which was m1.small:
the equivalent of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor, 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk and 250 Mb/second of network bandwidth. You pay just 10 cents per clock hour
During it’s peak and several months before and after I have paid a lot of money to Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure specially to EC2 and sucked in a lot of bandwidth. Happy that today, I complete 4 years as a paid-user of Amazon! Here’s a snapshot of my Access Key which was created on Sep 27, 2006! Viva Amazon.
