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Amazon Rolls Out EC2 Dedicated Instances for Cloud Customers

Amazon Web Services launched its EC2 Dedicated Instances service on Monday, in response to indications from its enterprise customers that they do not want to share computing resources with other companies.

Dedicated Instances works with Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, which allows customers to run Amazon resources in self-defined virtual networks. Using Dedicated Instances, Amazon's customers can choose to run dedicated compute resources on hardware that has been allocated specifically for their use.

According to a blog post by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, Amazon customers "have asked for hardware isolation so that they can be sure that no other company is running on the same physical host."

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, with pricing starting at $10 an hour. Amazon posted a detailed price list here.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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