Zeus Technology last week put its traffic management software in the cloud.

Users of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) can now use Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 on a pay-as-you-go basis when they need content caching, bandwidth management and service level monitoring capabilities.

Riverbed looks to speed cloud applications, storage

Zeus is packaged on Amazon EC2 as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is a template from which virtual machines, called instances, can be created. Each instance is essentially a Zeus virtual appliance packaged for use on EC2.

By making the technology available on the EC2 platform, Zeus hopes to make developing Web services easier for developers and companies, particularly during the planning and production stages, according to Zeus’s Mark Gyles. “By using a simple Web service interface, users can monitor and control Web traffic and automate maintenance to ensure online services are always fast and available even during high peaks in Web traffic,” Gyles wrote in a blog post.

One UK company called HomeMade Digital recently deployed Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 on EC2. The service provider works with major UK charities and needs to be able to deliver capacity to handle extra Web traffic when needs arise, according to Martin Gill, director at HomeMade Digital.

"When organizations need to respond to emergencies quickly, we need to scale their IT infrastructure and handle extra Web traffic seamlessly,” Gill said in a statement. “By scaling fast when needs arise, reducing page response times and data transfer costs, we're able to keep our client's hardware costs to a minimum while still providing a very high quality of service.”

Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 on Amazon EC2 is available on an hourly payment basis.

“Many enterprises need sophisticated Web traffic management, particularly at the planning or production stages of Web service development. Offering our solution on the Amazon Web Services Cloud gives customers the ability to tap into extra power for very little cost even during these early stages of development,” said Zeus CEO Paul Brennan in a statement.

is associate news editor at Network World.

SQL error at node_info: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)