As part of a project to offset usage spikes by auto spinning up EC2 instances on the fly for added computing power during high traffic periods, I needed to answer the question how fast could I really spin up an EC2 instance. So after running several tests against small and large EC2 instances running a base CentOS 5.3 AMI this is what I found:
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So recently I wanted to test how fast it would take to push a large amount of data into the Amazon S3 Cloud Computing Service. I already had an idea of the throughput, but wanted to make sure with a large amount of data over time my assumption was correct.
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(UPDATED: 05/31/2010)

This how to article will go over creating a Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Machine Image (AMI) from scratch. In this particular example we are creating a Centos 5.3 64bit AMI from beginning to end. For those that are interested in taking advantage of cloud computing, hopefully you find this blog article helpful. Note this blog also can be generalized for Centos 5, 5.1, 5.2 most versions of Redhat, and Fedora 64bit and 32bit.

First thing is first you are going to need to sign up for an Amazon Web Services account specifically S3 Storage and EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud here. You will need a credit card and some basic info, and will immediately get the following info: [...]