Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

The online press has been abuzz this week with the news that Amazon’s EC2 service has gone into beta. EC2 is a big Xen server farm in the sky, where you pay by the hour that your Xen virtual machine is running, and by the amount of bandwidth you consume. If you need a server running 24×7, then renting a dedicated server is probably cheaper than using EC2. But … if you only need a server running for part of the day (for example, during office hours), or if you have a service that can scale horizontally, then EC2’s well worth a look.

I’m currently re-installing Gentoo from scratch on my dual-Xeon box, and converting it over to be a local Xen test box, so that I can create some Gentoo AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) locally before uploading them to EC2. I’ll start off with a generic LAMP Server, and see where to go from there.

If you’re interested in lending a hand, give me a shout.