In the beginning, life in the cloud was simple. Type in your credit card number and—voilà—you had root on a machine you didn’t have to unpack, plug in, or bolt into a rack.
That has changed drastically. The cloud has grown so complex and multifunctional that it’s hard to jam all the activity into one word, even a word as protean and unstructured as “cloud.” There are still root logins on machines to rent, but there are also services for slicing, dicing, and storing your data. Programmers don’t need to write and install as much as subscribe and configure.
Here, Amazon has led the way. That’s not to say there isn’t competition. Microsoft, Google, IBM, Rackspace, and Joyent are all churning out brilliant solutions and clever software packages for the cloud, but no company has done more to create feature-rich bundles of services for the cloud than Amazon. Now Amazon Web Services is zooming ahead with a collection of new products that blow apart the idea of the cloud as a blank slate. With the latest round of tools for AWS, the cloud is that much closer to becoming a concierge waiting for you to wave your hand and give it simple instructions.
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