amazonaws.com?

Mon May 26 19:40:17 UTC 2008

On 26/05/2008 18:13 Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Quite a lot of EC2 compute time is for
> number crunching and such - not just hosting, or email, or ..

That's not actually true, the trend is towards thumbnail generation 
and video encoding dispatch for sites that use it, this requires 
getting the information back to storage. Mail processing would be an 
entirely valid use of this as well - you could for instance offload 
your own mail to EC2 instances for virus scanning and Bayesian spam 
filtering.

Either way, limiting of ports is a direct and undeniable limiting of 
the capability of the product. A staggeringly large amount of my spam 
comes from DSL lines in eastern europe and such places, and yet for 
some reason I don't see anyone here asserting that DSL lines should 
only be used for POP, IMAP and WWW and to talk to your ISP's SMTP 
relay. That's because it's a stupid move. It doesn't matter what EC2 
or any service is used for, it's sold as having an IP connection, not 
IP minus whatever TCP ports NANOG people dictate based on their 
beliefs about how you should do business or how customers should use it.

I agree with abuse reports and active abuse desks but please, don't 
for one second expect me to believe you side with the idea that 
upstream providers and hosts should randomly firewall ports - since 
90% of the time, as history has shown me, they screw it up.

-- 
Colin Alston ~ http://syllogism.co.za/
"To the world you may be one person, to one person you may be the 
world" ~ Rachel Ann Nunes.