This is a workspace service backend that serves as a portal to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

It allows clients to boot virtual machines in the Amazon cloud using grid protocols and their X509 credentials, first passing through the service's authorization and accounting layers.

The EC2 gateway provides:

• The ability to run any public Amazon Machine Image (AMI) image on Amazon as well as whatever AMIs the workspace service's credentials have access to privately.
• Asynchronous WSN notifications about status (EC2 does not, it relies on polling)
• Adjustment of the root account's SSH pubkey authorized_keys ("personalization") on the VM
• Running time enforcement
• It makes the public IP address of the VM known to you via resource property when the address becomes available (on EC2 this is known only after it begins to run).
• Detailed accounting that the authorization layer can use to make decisions based on a client's current aggregate and reserved usage.

This code is not in a current release, but it is currently deployed. The SSH personalization feature is only available with a pre-release client, found here. This will be available in the next VWS release.

EC2 only provides one set allocation:

• One 1.7GHz CPU (typically a 2GHz Opteron is seen)
• 1.7G RAM
• 140G+ scratch space
• 250Mb/s of bandwidth (bursting to 1Gb)
• 64 bit (Xen) kernel