Three months ago, a brilliant computer scientist I am fortunate to be friends with suggested me to take Amazon's EC2/S3 technologies for a spin, knowing that I am keen on innovative solutions and do not bother to play on the bleeding edge when the prospects seem to worth the scarce time I have in my hands. At first I was a bit confused. How come Amazon would provide web services when what they have been doing for over a decade is to sell entertainment in all shapes one can conceive?

Not only it does, but it is also on the forefront of an infrastructural revolution that will finally unravel all the candy Web 2.0 has to offer at reasonable rates. One of the greatest obstacles we all deal with when deploying "next generation" web applications, like complex social networks powered by ultimate AJAX accessibility fireworks and databse driven content management systems, is that most hosting plans are simply inadequate, static, unreliable, flaky. Even the dedicated boxes starting at €60/month are quite disappointing in regards to performance, not to mention the irresponsive support.

At a glance, EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is based on Xen Virtualization, increasingly used by Internet hosting service companies to provide virtual dedicated servers. The primary benefits of server virtualization are consolidation, increased utilization, an ability to rapidly provision and start a virtual machine, and increased ability to dynamically respond to faults by re-booting a virtual machine or moving a virtual machine to different hardware. Each virtual machine is the "equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth".

As of now, I have managed to convince one of our most faithful customers to entrust us the allocation and setup of a dedicated Debian 4.0 machine in the Cloud. It is being used as testbed to benchmark two main aspects: computational power and, even more important, connection speed (bandwidth). So far it has served thousands of videos at incredible streaming speeds and buffering times. Far beyond my initial expectations.

I will probably setup another couple of machines before including this service in our official catalog. If the experiment continues in the pathway of success, Efiplus will be able to support all stages of a web development cycle, from planning and deployment to hosting.