Nice, this was a critical missing piece in AWS.

Quoted: I would like to introduce to you the newest feature of Amazon EC2: Persistent local storage. This has been very high on the request list of EC2 customers and I believe that combined with the Availability Zones and Elastic IP Address features released earlier this month this makes EC2 the ideal environment for building highly scalable and reliable applications.

This new per request charge is very annoying -- especially in scenarios like the one I'm planning where you are using S3 for lots of small files.

Quoted: I had largely ignored the Amazon S3 pricing hike or decrease (depending on who you are) which included the addition of a per request charge. It really popped up again when I was recently talking to a new accelerator (just a few) + CDN customer recently.

Quoted: Because I am working on a widely distributed client application that can not contain our private S3 key, I have a web service on my own server set up that will create Query String Authentication URLS for use with S3. My service creates the URL, passes it back

This is a thin client built on top of amazon's s3.

Quoted: filicio.us is a simple file storage service built using Amazon S3. Files uploaded to filicio.us are stored at Amazon S3, but you'll use filicio.us it to upload files, organize using tags and share with others.