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Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Amazon Announces Floating Amazon Cloud Environment

The FACE uses durable, unmanned helium-filled blimps with a capacity of 65,536 small EC2 instances, or a proportionate number of larger instances. The top of each blimp is coated in polycrystalline solar cells which supply approximately 40% of the power needed by the servers and the on-board navigation, communication, and defense systems. The remainder of the power is produced by clean, efficient solid oxide fuel cells. There's enough fuel onboard to last about a month under normal operating conditions. Waste heat from the fuel cells and from the servers is used to generate additional lift.

There are two options for ground communication, WiMAX and laser. The WiMAX option provides low latency and respectable bandwidth. If you have the ground facility and the line of sight access needed to support it, lasers are the way to go. The on-board laser doubles as a defense facility, keeping each FACE safe from harm. Using automated target detectors with human confirmation via the Mechanical Turk, competitors won't have a chance.

Update: Based on popular demand, we will also implement RFC 1149.
-- Up, Up, and Away - Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky

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