EC2 and S3 rock. I sit on the ec2ubuntu google group http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu its a great group, and

EC2 and S3 rock. I sit on the ec2ubuntu google group http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu its a great group, and Eric Hammond created one of the best images i have seen yet. the original image was only ~100MB in size. Eric has done a lot of work to keep the images fast and small. He has put a number of optimizations in that few of the other public images have. As far as loadBalancing goes, we are going with Round Robin DNS until we HAVE to move to something more compliecated. Nettica offers some great tools for setting up Dynamic Round Robbin DNS records. RightScale is not so much a load balancing company as it provides you with some webui stuff to manage servers. EC2 in firefox is a much better start. WinSCP is a god send. It makes it so easy to put files on your instance. I am still trying to figure out how to either Wine install WinSCP on my Ubuntu install or to find a replacement. if you need anything and are an ubuntu user, join the group and email me. bandwidth between EC2 and S3 = 250Mb/s which is faster than most disks I know of. Latency is about 20ms. Accessing 2 xml files during a read/write still seems fast for the web.