The service is currently only available in AWS's US East Region and EU West region, which is in Ireland, but officials hope to expand the service to additional regions later this year. On-demand instances are available at $3.10 per hour in the U.S. and AWS says it is the first in a "new family" of high capacity offerings the company hopes to release.

Mehdi Daoudi is founder and CEO of Catchpoint, a SaaS-based performance monitoring company, and he's interested in the new AWS offering. Catchpoint currently uses a managed hosting provider as its core . "This is a game changer," he says. Daoudi has looked into other providers but none have been able to offer both the compute capacity combined with the geographic availability that AWS has. He's not yet sure if he'll convert to AWS, but he says the Catchpoint team will be investigating it. He's hopeful the high-capacity offering could allow Catchpoint to consolidate into a smaller number of compute servers hosting his application.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.