Amazon has plenty of spare cycles most of the year (hence Mechanical Turk and all this excess datacenter capacity they can contract out).
- They have this b/c they need to be able to accommodate their extrmeley peaky demand (i.e. holiday shopping season!!!)
- I wonder if this means netflix streaming will be significantly for flaky in the run-up to Xmas :)
EC2 doesn't run on spare capacity (although perhaps Amazon buys from EC2 in competition with other customers) and Netflix streaming doesn't run on EC2 anyway.
