Amazon's impulse-buy-perfecting $5 Dash button has been around for about a year now, and comes in over 100 branded flavors, but what we still don't have is a Wi-Fi button for not necessarily buying things. Some enterprising tinkerers have managed to intercept the signal Dash sends to Amazon's servers and do something else with it — like this guy who uses one to start his Tesla — but that's not really an ideal setup.

The real ideal would be a button we can register with an app and have it trigger any action on the internet. It would be the perfect way to make IFTTT physical. And it would likely do nothing for Amazon's bottom line.

So instead we get a compromise: Amazon is building a "limited release" AWS IoT Button, which is exactly like a Dash but it costs $20. Instead of buying diapers with your credit card every time you tap it, the AWS IoT Button sends a message to AWS (Amazon Web Services, the same cloud that hosts Netflix and serves up a good chunk of the rest of the internet). From AWS a developer can do just about anything with the message. Amazon lists some possibilities:

AWS IoT

AWS Lambda

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon SNS

Many other Amazon Web Services

These are, of course, paid services Amazon offers to developers. A $20 button is a nice little hook to get someone to try out AWS Lambda, for instance, which can run a snippet of code in the cloud every time you click the button, without you having to provision a whole machine. It won't take much code to escape the AWS confines and interact with the rest of the internet, but you're you're absolutely going to start there.