Is AWS is a game changer?

Sadagopan asks a question about Amazon's Web Services are Game changers? I am unsure about saying this as Game Changer per se. But again, Amazon is the smartest company presently cashing on the Web 2.o frency. Unlike your post, i dont think, Enterprises are not going to shy away completely from the offersing of Amazon. More and More enterprises [Amazon S3 even lists Microsoft in a case study]are now under tremendous pressure to deliver value. Managing huge infrastructure itself is a big job by itself. If a vendor like Amazon manages things for them, i think, they can outsource large volumes of data to Amazon. I strongly foresee, Amazon comes with an enterprise offering sometime later. The other company which can utilise the same is Google.

With Google Mini, they are already providing "box-packed" products to enterprises. I wont be surprised, if Google comes with their own way of utilising their data centers & infrastructure somewhere connected along with their lines of activities. Think about this, Google now gives you email, rss feeds,storage [the rumoured GDrive], payment facilities, [Google Checkout], writely, spreadsheets and lots n lots of SDKs for developers and end customers. How long will that take Google to customise a solution similar to EC2 or S3 which will be tightly integrated with their offerings. The best part then will be Google has to release low cost computing which will be seamlessly be integrated with their wi-fi plans for selected regions.

What is more important here is that with S3 & EC2 things are going to be lot more liberated from vendors. We can certainly look forward of things like Coghead , Ning or Sampa which will completely alter the development landscape if done well, where these services will certainly play a major role in their offing. For example, i am no longer using Thunderbird and i have switched over to Google Hosted Email service. This allows my office to completely work anywhere, without the issues of restricting our emails in a single machine. Every email service provider gives a web based access, the case in point is, Google's infrastructure and its distributed computing architecture, which makes it unique and worth to be in.

The future of computing is not definitely going to be on PCs, so the data delivery & recoverability needs to be centered around somewhere in the servers. This one single factor, will be the key pusher for these webservices or infrastructure based technologies.

Google Amazon S3 Technology Webservices Ning Coghead Sampa Distributed Services