I had an interesting meeting with my old friend Mike Culver this morning. Mike and I worked together back at Microsoft when he ran the evangelism efforts for the mobile developer platform and I was the .NET Compact Framework product manager.

Early in the conversation, Mike asked me if I was familiar with Amazon’s developer platform. Years ago I had dug a bit into their commerce Web services, so I figured I could bluff my way through the exchange. After all, SharpLogic is The Developer Marketing Company, right?

Wrong. Mike now works as a developer evangelist at Amazon. He knows when I don’t know.

Sure enough, Amazon’s platform has grown way beyond what I would have expected. Among the various services available, the two that became immediately intriguing were the Simple Storage Service (aka S3) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2).

In a nutshell, you can use S3 to cheaply store and serve a virtually limitless amount of data and EC2 provides virtualized servers (Linux-only for the foreseeable future). The neat thing about these is that you can scale up and down as much as you want and you only pay for what you use. Each EC2 node, for example, costs $.10 per hour. If you only use an hour a month, you only get charged $.10 a month. If you happen to have a huge load for 24 hours, you can continue to add more and more nodes, and then turn them off when the load is gone. You can even upload your own OS image. Amazing.

Microsoft and Google have some interesting offerings in a similar vein, but I haven’t seen anything public to meet this head-on yet, so Amazon is out to a huge advantage. I’m excited to see where this goes.

5/30/2007 3:46:52 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]