Jeff Barr of Amazon has just finished his talk about all the APIs and web services of Amazon and Alexa. That means d.construct 2006 has officially started.

For those who saw Jeff’s presentations at e.g. Xtech earlier this year, there was not much new stuff to be heard, except maybe the EC2 service of Amazon. The EC2 is sort of a root server providing on demand offered by Amazon for 0.20 $ per hour. This would mean you pay about 144 USD per month for a decent root server. Not really cheap, but since the service works on a on-demand basis and you only have to pay when you are actually using the server it might be an interesting alternative to renting a real server.

The service is in beta testing still and Jeff mentioned that it might be hard to get in right now, but he promised the situation will improve soon. Maybe we’ll give it a try.