Over the past two weeks I've spent some time with friends who are investigating Amazon's EC2 service.  I must say that I'm very impressed.  Essentially the service allows you to run a virtual computer.  You can then add and remove hosepower via web service calls, and all you pay for is the uptime per hour, and bandwidth.

I believe the service is either running Xen, or is based off of it. Either way, what they have done with it is truely amayzing.

I've been reading about Hadoop and Lucene for a while now.  Today I finally started working with the demos to get a better feel for how things work.

I'm excited to learn more!