I got a nice comment from Michael Crandell at RightScale regarding my post on Amazon's EC2, 'cos I had mentioned their offering.
I should say an additional word or two about RightScale.com: That's how I first launched an EC2 instance. When I first saw EC2, I read that you had to download command-line tools: But that seemed awkward to me, and I delayed experimenting. Then I read about RightScale.com, which provides a full-blown web-based interface for managing and launching instances. Personally, I think this is the way to get your feet wet with EC2.
It's great to use the command-line tools, as I have done now, and possibly use Amazon's programmable API directly to manage and create instances. But to get a feel for the products, I really like getting some guidance, and RightScale provides that -- and more, of course, such as the bundled MySQL setups I mentioned before.
Amazon made an interesting decision to provide EC2 and S3 via an API and leave it to others to create the web-based interfaces. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear the debate in the company as to whether they should offer the API or the API plus a web-based interface . . .
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