Amazon EC2 Beta

I got an invitation this morning. It looks like "web servers on demand" at $0.10 per hour.

"Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the
cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

Since it uses their S3 data storage service it looks to me like it would make compute intensive applications on large data objects very affordable. Individualized image manipulation of large digital photos for example.

I doubt if my sites will ever have a sudden need to have 20 dedicated servers come online within five minutes, but it looks like an opportunity for someone.

Anyone with a better technical background care to speculate on possible applications ?

i also got the invite and agree with you paul.. would like to hear others takes as well.

I'm sort of confused as to what it is.

Can anyone with access to it give more details?