Mashup Center Live on Amazon EC2
Nicole Carrier April 30 2009 08:11:04 PM
We just went live with Mashup Center v1.1 on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud!Yea! What does this mean? Well, we have just released a no-charge Mashup Center Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) for development purposes. (An Amazon Machine Instance is just like a virtual machine that contains a full install of IBM Mashup Center.) By no charge, I mean IBM doesn't charge you anything. However, to use this AMI, you do have to pay Amazon EC2 usage charges - which are actually pretty cheap, starting at 10 cents per hour. To give you an idea of how cheap it is, one of our developers who has been spending his time creating and deploying and testing this AMI over the past month or so has maybe racked up about 20 USD in charges.
Later this year- hopefully in August - we plan to roll out the production ready AMI that can be purchased on an hourly (pay-as-you-go) basis.
Why is this cool? Well, a few things:
1- As part of our relationship with Amazon, we have worked out a "bring your own license"deal, where customers can take their existing IBM licenses and use them on the Amazon EC2. Customers then get their Mashup Center going relatively cheaply- without expending a whole bunch of cash up front on hardware.
2- The development AMI is blazing fast. To me, it feels even faster than running Mashup Center on my local machine. This is great for evaluations, testing purposes, prototyping, and even demos. I'm pretty excited for us to get our own demo version of an AMI up and running.
3- Once we get the production AMIs going, EC2 will be a great low cost, quick start up option for our customers - especially those that want to test out the software or have a flexible environment for creating situational apps.
The second part of the strategy is to expand our addressable market. Here you can see the initial usage hours for sMash and Portal for the development AMIs. So we are up to almost 4k hours of usage a month for portal.
Anyway- please check it out! To learn more, go here –
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lsmashupcenter/ec2.html
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