http://justinsb.posterous.com/aws-down-why-the-sky-is-falling A blog post explaining nature of the current Amazon AWS outage. The deal is that several so-called availability zones (AZ) failed simultaneously in amazon US-EAST region, even though amazon’s FAQ describe such event to be unlikely. Many interesting comments – read them!
http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-faqs/ Amazon AWS is “PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 -compliant Shared Hosting Provider”. i.e. you can build your PCI-DSS compliant infrastructure using EC2, S3, EBS and VPC to store and process payment card data
http://code.mixpanel.com/amazon-vs-rackspace/ Notes about reasons why Mixpanel moves out of Rackspace cloud to EC2
http://atmail.com/kb/2008/setting-up-smtp-outbound-to-another-port-via-iptables-dnat/ if you are on EC2 hosting, redirect all your smpt traffic via SUBMISSION port
http://www.paessler.com/blog/2009/04/06/prtg-7/monitoring-cloud-computing-performance-with-prtg-cpu-disk-memory-speed-comparison-of-amazon-ec2-instance-types/ Confirms what was noted elsewhere: EC2 small instance is not worth the money, it performs several times slower than medium or large instances
http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/ Testing amazon and rackspace instances: kernel compile time and “how much it costs to compile kernel on $instance”, and IO tests using IOzone – in short: rackspace is cheaper/better, about 2x on average across the board. Note about “m1.small” i.e. small ec2 instance – performance sux, and it is actually cheaper to use a more expensive instance, “medium - cpu” or c1.medium.
http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/cracking-passwords-in-cloud.html article tells you that using elcomsoft tools, you can brute-force PGP pass-phrase in ~120 days for ~$9K on 10 EC2 instances.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2569362/Exploring-Amazon-EC2-for-Scaleout-Applications very interesting post from people who have done benchmarking and testing amazon EC2 platform
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html Amazon’s “Dynamo” - distributed hash table. Interesting bibliography at the end of the article