SharkJumping

At Meez, we're in the process of switching the majority of our bandwidth, storage and computing power to Amazon's Web Services group.  AWS is a suite of web services which seems to be catching fire with many of the smaller web start-ups in Silicon Valley, especially those who are launching Facebook applications when you're not sure how successful it will be when you first launch them.

After spending a reasonable amount of time with due diligence on various current customers of AWS, the benefits seem clear.  Amazon has built a series of massive storage/bandwidth (S3) and server farms (EC2), and they're willing to lease computing power on them to other companies in a utility-like way, meaning you just pay by the byte in most cases.  Your upfront costs are ZERO, and the ongoing costs are incredibly competitive, although there is no guaranteed level of service and it doesn't currently support MS technologies, just Linux.  In addition, there are apparently some growing pains in the services, such as inadequate tools, occasional bugs, and some possible latency issues with certain services.

That having been said, we're huge fans, and it looks to us and everyone I survey that its a really compelling offering vs our alternatives.  So why is Google not doing this, or IBM or Sun?  Rumor is that Google's offering is 6-12 months away since they're over-thinking it, that IBM hasn't even seen the opportunity yet, and even stranger, that Sun has had an offering similar to AWS for a while now, but no one actually uses it since no one I asked could even remember the name.  So it means that Amazon has quite a runway for the next 6+ months, and so far, I'd say the buzz is really good on it.