What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?
But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.
The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things.
The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?
It's not an arbitrary name, elasticity is a defining concept of "cloud".
>As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case.
EC2 is one tool. There are other tools in the Amazon box for other use cases [0] and other boxes from other providers entirely.
>Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.
It's elastic because you can allocate and deallocate rapidly and pay only for what's allocated at a given time.