The cloud is good. The cloud is new. We like cloud.

Now that that’s settled, AWS engineers are well underway in making persistent, durable storage available to EC2 instances. This opens up a whole new world of possiblilty to those of use who have been intrigued by running AMIs, but put off by the fact of having to upload your whole database or file set each time you start one.

Some of of the beta-testers already have been hard at work using DRDB/HA and NFS on LVM over VTun, which is not only an impressive array of acronyms but a really cool way to put high-availability services in the cloud at (hopefully) low cost.

Even with only a single ephemeral EC2 instance accessing the data, exciting possibilities exist in terms of backup services, database replication, or using High-CPU instances to run bioinformatics programs, modeling, GIS data analysis or any other intensive task that crushes CPU and memory but only needs to be run once in a while.

Hardware? what’s that?

update: early beta-tester Thorsten from RightScale also got enthusiastic.

update 2: Amazon announced today (Aug 21) that the public beta of “Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)” is now available. Even better - volume snapshots (differential backups) can be taken that be stored in S3. And pricing only is $0.10/Gb/month, with a small surcharge for I/O. Yep I am JAF (Just Another Fanboy), especially since I haven’t even tried it yet. Will be getting my grubby mitts on these elastic blocks soon as a window in my space-time continuum opens.