Mmmmm Virtual Infrastructure….
So I’ve decided to go with EC2 - it’s the future IMHO… utility computing and all that jazz. More compelling are Amazon’s revised costing structures.
How to go about using it? Sign up! 
If you are out of luck and can’t get an account rightscale can help you out there by acting as a proxy to amazon for you - bloody brill service. Excellent demo of automatic horizontal scaling by rightscale - I’d have questions on how automatic this is and if it can do adaptive and predictive scaling.
The documentation at the dev site is great so no need to repeat.
There’s plenty of us out there that wanna use the olde bauld ubuntu - there’s an image of it as a shared amazon public image - just one caveat - there’s no local loopback adapter configured so all you need to do is follow the instructions here. If that doesn’t suit then get familiar with debootstrap and read through here - it’s not alot! Some more resources describing the creation of custom AMIs can be found here and here
With this image up and instantiated, for my needs (at least right now), all I have to do is to install Tomcat (good resource here) and re-jigger the config file to listen on port 80 (yea yea I know - I’ll be proxying to it, but later).
