The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple Web service interface allows businesses to seamlessly obtain and configure capacity. It provides complete control of computing resources and runs on Amazon's computing environment.

 

With this latest news, European developers and businesses are able to now run their Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones in the EU to help attain lower latency, work closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and comply with EU data storage requirements when applicable.

 

The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones facilitating developers to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the U.S. 

 

One major benefit of Amazon EC2 is that it cuts the time needed to obtain and boot new virtual server instances to minutes. This enables developers to scale capacity, both up and down, as computing requirements change. In addition, businesses are able to reduce capital expense and pay for resources as they are used. 

 

“We are very excited to fulfill one of our top user requests by launching Amazon EC2 in Europe.  In conjunction with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront in the EU, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) customers can now locate their storage, distribution, and compute in Europe, better allowing them to achieve low latency to their European customers and to meet EU data storage requirements when applicable,” said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. “Starting today, businesses needing globally distributed infrastructure can easily manage and deploy their storage and compute with a simple, powerful set of web service APIs and tools.”

 

By going to http://aws.amazon.com, developers all over the world can take advantage of Amazon EC2 and other AWS infrastructure services.

 

With the launch of Amazon EC2, European developers and businesses with European customers will benefit from advanced features for Amazon EC2 including multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

 

In the coming months, Amazon EC2 will also support Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU. This is a new feature that was recently introduced on Amazon EC2 in the U.S. 

 

"The ease of getting up and running on Amazon EC2 has made us rethink the way we currently operate our distributed computing on the Grid," stated Stefan Kluth, local project lead in Munich for computing for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator at CERN. “We’re excited by the potential to move faster than previously possible because we can focus on the experiment as opposed to the technology to run it."

 

"For the last two years CohesiveFT has been working to help European customers leverage the power of Amazon Web Services," said Alexis Richardson, co-founder and director of business development at CohesiveFT.  "The launch of Amazon EC2 services in Europe sets the stage for an exciting new wave of production deployments with reduced latency, expanded regulatory compliance options, and the ability to deploy scale-up / scale-out architectures within the region."

 

With Amazon EC2, developers only pay for what they use and there are no up-front charges or minimum fees. 

 

Below are the U.S. prices for Amazon EC2 in Europe:

Standard (per instance hour consumed)

$0.11 for small instances
$0.44 for large instances
$0.88 for x-large instances

 

High CPU (per instance hour consumed)

$0.22 for medium instances
$0.88 for x-large instances

 

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.17 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.11 per GB - next 100TB
$0.10 per GB – over 150TB

 

Online retail giant, Amazon.com (News - Alert) is a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle. The company was launched in 1995 and today offers a wide selection of new and used products at competitive prices. Amazon.com seeks to be the world’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find anything they might want to buy online, and sets out to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.

 

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS).