EC2 Makes Getting a Startup Going Suck Less

Obviously getting your startup going doesn't suck (well, hopefully not all the time), but it is a shit load of work.  You need a kick ass idea, people to build it, a way to distribute, somehow get people to pay for what you're doing and countless other tasks.  This is a lot to deal with, and since you're a startup it's probably you or a small team doing all the work.  Well, if you happen to be building a web based product Amazons EC2 platform is defiantly something to check out.

EC2 is Amazons 'Elastic Cloud Computing' platform and it lets you take advantage of Amazons huge server and computing infrastructure to run your own server instances.  There are countless advantages to running your application in the cloud like this, the big ones in my opinion are cost savings as you pay for what you use, flexibility in expanding your server farm and the reliability of a distributed and proven network.

This is really cool.  If you think back to a couple of years ago how you would setup your own infrastructure you'd need to go out and buy some expensive servers and load balances, get it all setup somewhere  and then hope the traffic doesn't blow up the machines before you can get get more in to handle the load.  Now with EC2 you don't need to worry about the hardware and over purchasing to handle the load or running out and buying a new machine when one gets fried.

Things with EC2 aren't quite perfect yet, but they're not far off and a lot of the pain points are going to be addressed in the near future (2009) Amazon says.  From the Amazon Web Services blog, here's a couple of the things to look forward to:

Awesomesauce.  Those are the exact things that have been creating extra work when using their current offering, Amazon is spot on with the features that their users are really looking for.

I really like what Amazon is doing in this space, but if you don't or if it doesn't do what you need it to there are alternatives.  Google App Engine (GAE) is one such alternative that looks pretty neat.  It's neat because it's built by google, on top of their infrastructure and allows easy integration with existing google services (docs, accounts, etc).  In it's current state it's nothing compared to EC2. 

The biggest difference is that with GAE you're tied to using python for your application development and you can't really customize the platform at all.  With EC2 you start with a basic linux (and now windows) that you can then customize with whatever you want.  But if you don't want to do all that work, and you're a python kind of person, GAE might be perfect for you.  I, on the other hand, prefer the flexibility you get with EC2 and can't wait to see where they go from here.

Go out, get started.