"We are talking about this service at this early stage because we believe this will help many of our EC2 customers with setting their development priorities for this year."<p>translation:
"Contrary to what we usually do, we decided to announce this still under development features so Google App Engine doesn't continue to steal headlines, or any future clients choosing a platform, from us - you know how the press loves to champion Google innovation."
This new feature addresses what I think is the biggest complaint about EC2, as seen on their discussion boards. People used to complain about the lack of static IPs, now that's no longer a problem. Once they get around to rolling out this feature to the public, the only legit complaint that people would have for them is the base cost when starting out.<p>When your traffic is zero or very low, as in the case of when you're just starting out, a conventional VPS host is still a lot cheaper. But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform.
That's pretty awesome. I think Amazon is doing the right thing, and keeping things open, unlike Google's closed system. I have been trying it out, and I don't like the idea of building an app so closeley tied to one vendor.<p>The only thing that Amazon needs is a good online system for managing their offerings. I guess scaler and rightscale try to solve this problem, but amazon could provide some better system managing themselves.