Amazon has quietly been expanding their business as of late. These newest additions are not stores targeted at consumers. Instead Amazon is targeting developers with a trio of services:

Elastic - Add Servers in Minutes



Completely Controlled - Root acces to each machine you deploy. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system running Fedora Core with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.



Pricing is based on the time/data that you use.

$0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).

$0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).

$0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Data transfer between EC2 servers or Amazon S3 is free.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Features:

Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited



Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces



Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.



Pricing is based on the data stored/transfered.

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.



$0.20 per GB of data transferred.



Amazon Simple Queue Serve (SQS)

Amazon SQS offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations.

Reliable - To prevent messages from being lost or becoming unavailable, all messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.



Simple - Developers can utilize Amazon SQS queues by using only four APIs: CreateQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, and DeleteMessage. The SOAP, REST and query APIs can be used with virtually any language and platform.



Scalable - Amazon SQS was designed to enable an unlimited number of computers to read and write and unlimited number of messages at any time.



Inexpensive - No up-front or fixed expenses. The only cost of sending messages through Amazon SQS is a small per-message handling fee based on the size of a message.



Again pricing is based only on usage.