I have received lots of feedback (via email) regarding my post about Amazon's EC2 web services offering. Quite a lot of questions were dealing with bundling a modified AMI. I promise I'm going to describe the process in detail as soon as I find some more time. A quick and preliminary answer: I managed to install Apache2 on one of the available Ubuntu Desktop AMIs and create a new bundle from it in order to save the changes I've made. Here's a screen capture of the ongoing S3 upload of the AMI image I've created:   (Click to...

As part of my professional job I'm currently doing some research on scaling complex event processing engines. Enterprise level complex event processing will almost always involve spanning processes across machine boundaries. I have been using VMWare Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC for some of my early prototypes, however, I soon ran into the problem that running more than 2-4 machines in parallel got quite difficult given the overhead added by the virtualization software itself. I decided to look into Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service which I have heard of before but never tried it myself. EC2 has...