"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."

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.

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.

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.

this is yet another step in the right direction. amazon is clearly listening to their target consumers. can't wait to try it out.