Amazon Web Services ?

Today Amazon Web Services is out of beta and into full production. And entered into full production with its latest offering of SqlServer and Windows in the cloud. Together with Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services are the two major offers for cloud computing and they are directed to a very different target audience. While the Google offering is more directed to a developer community that programs in phyton and C, the Amazon offering is devoted to business in general and with the incorporation of the Microsoft offer to the ones that want to experiment with cloud computing by porting existing applications. I think it is increasingly clear that in a world where software applications will be dependent on a constant on high quality connection, cloud computing is the way to go. Also is pretty obvious the fact that companies like Google or Amazon, with a first quality proven infrastructure, will aim to leverage this advantage well beyond its internal use. However these offers have implications well beyond its bet on capturing a new and emergent market. Until now infrastructure, the capacity to build and sustain it, has been a major barrier for developing any Internet offering. Just remember for the sake of the example all complaints about the lack of scalability of ruby on rails a year ago or so. By removing this barrier and transforming infrastructure into a commodity, not only a new market is captured, but also an important barrier for innovation is being removed. This is a tendency that is happening not only in computing, our friend Vicente Guallart the sould behind Fab Lab Barcelona presents us with the same argument, this time in fabrication and more in its early stages, but in fact, the same concept. As Michel Bauwens will say, this is one step more and one obstacle less to empowering users into a non-market, distributed system of production or a peer system of production, whatever you want to put it … Therefore, maybe is not about cloud computing after all …