The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service provides a better economic model for large-scale applications -- the owner of the application only pays for hardware per usage and on a low-cost basis, while benefiting from the reliability of the Amazon infrastructure. However, running stateful applications in such a distributed environment faces several challenges that hinder performance and scalability. This paper describes a solution for running stateful applications (high-performance data-intensive and transactional) in the Amazon EC2 environment.

Section One presents an overview of EC2 and the challenges faced by developers and architects when they need to run high-performance stateful applications in such a distributed environment. It then goes on to review the GigaSpaces solution which enables running such applications on EC2, allowing them to benefit from all of the advantages that EC2 provides.

Section Two is a hands-on guide that describes the architecture of a GigaSpaces application on EC2 and provides step-by-step instructions for developing, integrating and deploying stateful applications on the EC2 environment.