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Amazon EC2 is a popular elastic cloud computing service that has developers in mind. EC2 offers complete control over web computing resources and structures its pay-as-you-go feature as specific as a per minute usage basis. Amazon offers other web services that allow developers to easily utilize different degrees of infrastructure and SaaS needs on an as-needed basis.
 Amazon EC2 works with other Amazon services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) allows users to utilize applications, create libraries, data, and associated configuration settings. It is also possible to use templated images that are already available for usage and allow instance usage of EC2. In comparison to other cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure, GoGrid, and Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 offers a very flexible structure that works with almost every platform. Amazon EC2 has also been around for a few years already and so has had more of an opportunity to claim marketshare and presence in the Cloud Computing community. Amazon has quite a few case studies available that go in-depth regarding the actual monetary savings and results from businesses using their web services. Although there are additional case studies available on the Amazon site, here is an example of a case study that had a lot of impact on the organization financially: Mailtrust | Company Profile: 100% focused on business email hosting and at the time of the case study, they were managing more than 800,000 paid business email accounts. Mailtrust has since been acquired by Rackspace and is now the Email and Apps division of Rackspace Hosting, which handles more than 1 million accounts. What did EC2 do for them?: Amazon EC2 saved them over $187,000 and MailTrust projects their savings for year two at $545,000 and savings for year three at $1.3 Million. The company projected that this would save the company around $2 Million in three years. Download a PDF of the Case Study. (Requires Adobe PDF Reader) - Mailtrust used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for a faster, more cost-efficient online storage solution in conjunction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
- “Amazon S3 Storage has helped us lower costs, improve performance of our email hosting system, and enhance the reliability of our email data backups, and has allowed us to deploy resources in more strategic ways,” said Patrick Matthews, president of Mailtrust.
- With Amazon S3, Mailtrust now has a fully scalable, high performance backup system. They customized their backup client to eliminate duplication, they backup all servers in parallel, and they run backups at night to avoid slow email performance. And with the power of Amazon’s API, they built a web-based tool that enabled customers to browse their backups and perform their own data restores for free.
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