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Amazon Dedicates EC2 Private Clouds
Amazon Web Services is launching EC2 Dedicated Instances today as part of its Virtual Private Cloud offering. The service is targeted at enterprise customers that want Amazon elastic cloud services on single-tenant hardware resources in a self-defined virtual network.
EC2 "classic" tenancy is set up by default to allow compute instances from multiple AWS customers to run on the same physical host. The new dedicated service may help some companies meet regulatory requirements.
Customers "have asked for hardware isolation so that they can be sure that no other company is running on the same physical host," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.
Barr explained that selecting a dedicated instance when the VPC is built will ensure all instances launched within that VPC run on single-tenant hardware. Once established, he noted, that tenancy cannot be changed.
"It is important to note that launching a set of instances with dedicated tenancy does not in any way guarantee that they'll share the same hardware (they might, but you have no control over it)," he wrote. "We actually go to some trouble to spread them out across several machines in order to minimize the effects of a hardware failure."
Customers will pay a premium for Dedicated Instances. Pricing starts at $10 an hour. Amazon posted a detailed price list here.