MapReduce infrastrucure on AWS. Interesting that they are charging only 1/6th the price of an EC2 instance to use a MapReduce CPU...why is that, I wonder?

(turns out the MR charges are IN ADDITION to EC2 charges you use!)

Quoted: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform 'in the cloud'. These pay-as-you-use cloud computing services include Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon FPS, and others .

The AWS Startup Challenge Finalist. The winner will be announced at an event at Bell Harber (Seattle) on Nov 20th.

RSVP Here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/StartupRSVP%3f

Windows support is now live at Amazon Web Services. They've also upgraded their current EC2 service to "full production" status with an SLA (removing the "Beta" label).

Quoted: My colleagues and I have spent the week building up anticipation for this post on Twitter. After you read this post I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worthwhile. The hallways at Amazon have been buzzing...

AWS is soon going to have Windows instances available!

Quoted: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform 'in the cloud'. These pay-as-you-use cloud computing services include Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon FPS, and others .

An AWS evangelist is going to be hanging out at Startpad once a month starting June 24th!

Client can post fields and files to S3 directly to S3 w/o going through your server.

Whitepaper from Amazon describing how to build more scalable web applications using their Simple Queuing Service (SQS).

New announcements for AppEngine. No more waiting for accounts - anyone can sign up now w/o waiting (150,000 have already signed up!)

New API's: MemCache and Image Manipulation.

Pricing: about $40/month for your SECOND 5M page views (first will be FREE, as now). Comparing to Amazon's services:

Storage: $0.15 - $0.18/GB (S3 is $0.15)
Outgoing Bandwidth: $0.11 - $0.13 (S3 is $0.10 - $0.17)
Incoming Bandwidth: $0.09 - $0.11 (S3 is $0.10)

Note - AWS also charges $0.01 per 10,000 GET's.

AWS applications can charge customers for use via Amazon payments (one time or recurring).

Quoted: Amazon Web Services @ Amazon.com