SmugMug's Don MacAskill

June 5th, 2008 near Maryville, Missouri by Shane Kirk

In case you didn’t see it, Amazon had a huge EC2 announcement the other day that included:

• EC2 is now out of beta.
• EC2 has a SLA!
• Windows is now availabled on EC2
• SQL Server is now available on EC2

But the really cool bits, if you ask me, are the announcements about the next wave of related services:

• Monitoring
• Load Balancing
• Auto-Scaling
• A web-based management console

As frequent readers of my blog and/or conference talks will know, this means one of the last important building blocks to creating fully cloud-hosted applications *at scale* is nearly ready for primetime.

For those keeping score at home, my personal checklist shows that the only thing now missing is a truly scalable, truly bottomless database-like data store. Neither Elastic Block Storage (EBS) nor SimpleDB really solve the entire scope of the problem, though they’re great building blocks that do solve big pieces (or everything, at smaller scale). I’m positive that someone (Amazon or other) will solve this problem and I can start moving more stuff “to the Cloud”.

I can’t wait.