Test Driving An Amazon EC2 Micro Instance

[tweetmeme source=@LouisColumbus only_single=false]

Last month Amazon Web Services launched Micro Instances for EC2, the lowest-cost instance type they have offered to date.  A Micro instance includes 613MB of memory and can support 32- and 64-bit platforms on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

The pricing begins at $0.02 per hour for Linux and $0.03 per hour for Windows.  In addition, a Micro instance supports Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for defining applications, data structures and databases in addition to configurations.  Amazon is also including a templated image to get up and running quickly with a Micro instance as well.

Greg Wilson, who is a Sr. Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, produced one of the best tutorials and test drives available, which is shown below. He has also written a blog entry regarding lessons learned which can be found at My dive into the world of Amazon EC2 and the new crazy cheap Micro instance.

Bottom line: Micro instances are going to shift cloud-based development away from compute- and data-intensive application development to smaller applications and web services.  Given the price point, the use of Micro instances could lead to a proliferation of new low-end, utilitarian-like applications as well.