Last week we were sat around discussing the possible problems of an open alpha. One of the big problems is if people start using the service - obviously this is sort of good, but it brings with it a lot of potential issues. Part of what we are trying to gain is an understanding of real operational issues early, which can only improve the service, but that’s no good if the problems cause the whole thing to fall over - for example, because a lot of people are using it.

Well, we said, what we really need is someone (we thought Google) to come out with a flexible hosting system, where we could throw virtual machines at the problem if the load got too high. And lo, yesterday Amazon announced their beta of their Elastic Compute Cloud Service. Amazon have been doing some very cool stuff with their Web Services - their Simple Storage Service and Simple Queue Service are core building blocks of good applications, and I’ve been looking forward to an opportunity to use them.

Well, this Elastic Compute Cloud is just what we need, and as it happens I was invited onto the limited beta. So I’ve been hacking since 6am getting an Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server image prepared for loading up to their cloud. It’s uploading right now - fingers crossed it’ll work. If so, we should have sleevenotez running on their cloud later today!