EC2 & S3

AWS is the most mature and broadest of the current cloud offerings providing scalable services for computation (EC2), storage (S3 & SBS), databases (SimpleDB & RDS), messaging (SQS & SNS), etc. The list of services provided by AWS continues to expand rapidly with new services being added on an almost monthly basis, (http://bit.ly/90887v). While existing applications can be deployed on AWS through the use of Amazon Machine Images the full benefits of this platform will come from applications that are developed to take advantage of AWS. The usage based billing model adopted by AWS allows organizations to scale applications without large upfront investment and avoid the overhead cost of under utilized hardware.

The Cloud continues to be of interest to us, with Software as a Service the most mature cloud component. Platform and Infrastructure as service offerings have reached different levels of maturity, and we reflect that in our placement of EC2, Google App Engine and Azure.