Fired up my first windows server using Amazon's EC2 yesterday. Now I want to create a virtual network, with multiple servers and open it up through Amazon's VPN service. It is a brave new world!

Total cost of this project till today 2.19 USD!

Good luck...

Heh Sooz, imagine thousands of computers connected to each other, offering their processor time and storage space to any willing customer. Those computers are not offered individually to the customer, but between all those computers and the customer (me) a complex software layer is introduced. That layer in turn offers me the processor time and storage space of the underlying computers. That complex software layer is called a Cloud.

And the geek fun doesn't stop there, normally when you buy a Windows operating system you pay a full license. In the case of a Cloud license you only pay for the time you use that Windows operating system. So if I use Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (costs a few thousand dollars in retail) in a cloud for a few hours it only costs me a 1.5 dollars.

This makes such a service an ideal solution for starting companies who don't want to invest in a lot of hardware and software, but just buy the resources from a Cloud solution. Amazon is the biggest player in that market right now.

I think I read somewhere that it is more then 3 years ago that Amazon Cloud services suffered any downtime.