Amazon and Google are launching some amazing services these days. Amazon’s services include: Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and now Flexible Payments Service. These services may be accessed via APIs (web services) and are used by developers to introduce new products and services. Amazon charges a small fee for using their infrastructure and this is a new income stream for them. The solutions catalog lists a number of solutions built on Amazon’s Web services. Interesting solutions include: RightScale.com (instance management), File123.com (file management) and Jungledisk.com (internet backups). The following blog gives a good overview of what EC2 means for entrepreneurs.I think that utility computing is finally here. This is what IBM’s been talking about for a while, on demand computing.Google offers another set of interesting web services. It includes APIs for interacting with Google Apps and Google Gears that enables web applications to work offline. Adobe offers something similar called, AIR (formerly Apollo). Offline web applications will bring the power of Web 2.0 applications to the offline desktop (Did I just say that? Web apps more powerful than desktop apps?)Intuitively I know that this is a huge disruptive change — if only I can figure out how to take advantage of it! Let me know if you’ve figured it out…Update Sept 6, 2007: Check out SynthaSite’s use of Amazon’s Computing Cloud. Nirvanix recently launched as an alternative to Amazon’s S3. Nirvanix provides an SLA — Amazon doesn’t.
