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I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in nature.

I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in nature. But people ARE starting to look at them and it is an area (PaaS) that is going to become more and more compelling for businesses in the future. And Amazon is right now is the only player I know of in that space. And every new user they attract could well be locked in for life.

ajross 14y ago
But I think you're missing the point. Google App Engine (and Heroku for that matter) is a PaaS product. They were there first, and they lost to the commodity metaphor. You can argue that Amazon will succeed based on the quality of their offering, I guess, but not simply because it's "PaaS". The market has spoken, they don't like that.
- nl 14y ago
  PaaS hasn't lost - it's just a smaller market than IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and it will take longer to become mature. IaaS is immediately useful to anyone who needs a Linux box. PaaS needs longer lead times for people to adapt to a new platform. Amazon's approach to the PaaS market is probably a lot better than Google's. Google went: here's a new set of APIs, write custom apps to use them. Amazon let you host standard LAMP apps, and then slowly started offering parts of the stack as a service (oh, you need a database? Here, use our managed one. You need search? We have that. Load balancing? Just use ours, it's easier than doing it yourself.)