A new social search service called SideStripe has been released into the wild. The service lets you find information as well as ask questions and get answers from the people in your social network. They also have a nice widget that embeds itself right in your Google results.
SideStripe is running on EC2 with app servers behind load balancers, SimpleDB is the database and S3 is used for larger data that doesn’t fit in S3 as well as for shared caching.
Starting November 1st, the following pricing structure will take effect.
Current storage price (through Oct 31, 2008)
US: $0.150 per GB
EU: $0.180 per GB
New storage price (effective Nov 1, 2008)
US
$0.150 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.130 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.120 Storage used / month over 500 TB
EU
$0.180 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.170 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.160 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.150 Storage used / month over 500 TB
I’m still hoping that they drop the per request price at some point.
Currently EC2 only supports Unix based operating systems, but coming this fall you’ll be able to run Windows Servers. This may not sound like much, but sometimes you just need it and it will be nice to be able to have it. We needed Windows as part of our infrastructure for one project and we actually we had to lease a windows box from another host and send messages between them to get things done… not pretty. This should solve that problem.
This is also great news for you ASP.NET developers. Welcome to the cloud!
