Ensembl and Amazon Web Services

We're happy to announce that Ensembl is one of the launch partners for Amazon's "Public Data Sets" initiative, so the MySQL data and index files for the current release of Ensembl can be accessed from within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. From the Amazon website:

AWS Hosted Public Data Sets provide a convenient way to share, access, and use public domain or non-proprietary data within your Amazon EC2 environment. Select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot. Any Amazon EC2 customer can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volume from a publicly shared Amazon EBS public data set snapshot. They can then access, modify, and perform computation on these data sets directly using an Amazon EC2 instance and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use.

Details of how to access the data can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets .

We have plans to make much more use of AWS in the future, stay tuned!