I think people are doing it, they are just not slicing it up in a pay-as-you-go format for end users. The best talk I ever saw in this area was by Paul Strong

I think people are doing it, they are just not slicing it up in a pay-as-you-go format for end users. The best talk I ever saw in this area was by Paul Strong from eBay (they obviously have a very strong requirement for both scalability and consistency). He talked about how they eventually ripped out all transactions and stored procedures from the RDBMS layers and built their own giant, cross cluster, consistent system to make the zillion customer/auction problem finally managable. For the less giant problems, I think Amazon could charge a premium for an API-managed RDBMS solution, they have all the tools for making one in place (as opposed to requiring you go build it yourself with EBS and EC2 nodes). add-slave-node() ...