The Amazon EC2 team has recently added two new instance types to their EC2 offering, a web service that provides rentable, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

They have introduced a "Large" and an "Extra Large" instance type to complement the original instance type and provide more flexibility for EC2 users. The new types provide more memory, CPU, and storage, and are now based on 64bit technology.

The system is powered by the Xen virtualization technology and has been fairly well received. Last month however, the company confirmed that it had an EC2 control and monitoring API outage which caused some of its customers to lose instances and data.

New supported instances include:

Small Instance (Default) - $0.10 per instance hour
1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform.

Large Instance - $0.40 per instance hour
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

Extra Large Instance - $0.80 per instance hour
15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

You can enroll for this open beta program, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 19, 2007 04:45 AM