Commodity Grid Computing with Amazon's S3 and EC2
Simson Garfinkel · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 2007
Amazon.com recently introduced two new storage and computing services that might fundamentally change the way that we provision equipment for both e-commerce and high-performance computing. I learned about these services a few days after I had started looking for quotes to purchase a multiblade server with 10-20 TB of storage to further my own research in computer forensics. Rather than moving ahead with that purchase, I decided to evaluate whether or not I could use Amazon's offering for this real-world problem. My conclusion is that Amazon's offering is good enough for my research and will probably save me tens of thousands of dollars, but the system isn't yet ready for hosting serious e-commerce customers.