Amazon EC2 Instance

For some reason today I got a nervous feeling that I have too many Amazon EC2 instances up and running....I was up to 20 instances mid week to support our event in May. I shut them down 24 hours later, but for some reason I got worried that I had left some up and running.

I have done this before....left an instance running a day or two longer than I should have. In this economy we can't be spending any more than we have to. And my EC2 budget has been running high, playing with our new found power.

Definitely a catch of the on demand power, you can launch and scale as you need it. However you can also leave processing and storage power out there without thinking about it.

Earlier this week I had taken a tour of SkyTap, another cloud provider. They do not focus on production environments, they focus on the testing, prototyping and QA side of server and application development.

One feature they had that I really liked.....when launching an instance you can set a schedule of its life.....and it will shut down on that specified schedule.

Great feature. Seems like something Amazon could adopt to help us IT people with tight budgets.