Amazon launched the beta of first virtual datacenter on demand, based on Xen, in August 2006, calling it Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
In the effort to put more emphasis on the service (and ride the new hype about virtual appliances), the company now allows EC2 customers to share their Xen virtual machines, called Amazon Machine Images or AMI.
The new EC2 API of October 2006 supports following features:
- Making an AMI public
- Sharing an AMI with a specific user
- How others might discover and launch shared AMIs
- Making a shared AMI’s private again
- Advertising your shared AMI
Already shared AMIs are available at the Public AMIs page, where users can also write a review and assign a rating.
Thanks to GridVM for the news.