Inside Amazon EC2

A few weeks ago, Amazon quietly launched the Elastic Compute Cloud service (beta, of course). I had been dying to get my hands on an account since then and just today I got my confirmation email. I wasn't really expecting something like this from Amazon (though after S3, it wasn't too unexpected), so I was even more intrigued. And when I found out that EC2 was running off of Xen, I was just blown away!

Anyways, so here are my notes so far:

• the documentation is excellent, so I won't waste your time and mine going over it again. Everything worked out of the box for me.
• Yes, they are running Xen.
• The getting started image comes with 9G of disk on the root partition and an additional whooping 140G on /mnt. /mnt doesn't seem to be network mounted (unless its a networked block device) though.
• The VM has a lot of RAM. My VM shows me 1.8G of RAM. Thats more than what I have on my laptop!!!
• The VM sees a 2.4-GHz uni-processor AMD Opteron. So Amazon is not using Intel machines for their cluster. Thats interesting.
• As far as I can tell, they are running just two VMs per physical machine, with 50% hard reservations for each of the VMs.

More later.