Speaking of game changing - Google announced their web services a week ago - now Amazon has announced something truly cool - persistent storage for EC2. Not S3, mind you - attached storage for the EC2 instance that is persistent:

In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.

These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you'd like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.

This is absolutely huge - it means that you can now run an entire application stack on Amazon's service without having to rely on S3/SimpleDB for the back end storage. Need to scale your website up? That just got a whole lot simpler.

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