Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Mr Vogels, AWS CTO at Structure 2011

Thus spoke Zarathustra: Cloud has nothing to do with technology, is defined by benefits.We said it for 4 years. Clouds have to do with business benefits. Sure we employ technologies, there no definition of the cloud that includes predefined technologies.

Clouds are a business proposition and no paying customer is attracted by elegant technology; Only by benefits: more agility, lower costs (of course lower costs)

Mr. Vogels is lending all the prestige of his title and company behind him, Amazon Web Services, to convey respectability to an idea Nati Shalom and I developed in 2009.

There are two main driving forces for Cloud-Computing:

1. On demand computing i.e. the ability to get a resource when I need it in matters of minutes.

2. Pay-per use i.e. the ability to pay only for what I use.

The rest is implementation detail.

Werner says those cloud drawings with a platform at the bottom & apps at the top are obsolete. The ecosystem is in.. Nati Shalom drew  this two years ago, among many others contributors.
The exception is that an ecosystem applies not only to AWS, but to everyone in cloud computing.

One mantra AWS and its CTO repeats for years we do the heavy lifting for you This is not original. Psalm 55:22 says Cast your burden upon the LORD and He will sustain you. Amazon has a bit of Bible copyright issue, if they don't reveal their source. If they would, they will reveal their conviction that as far as cloud computing goes, they are God.

The most used word,  I counted about 15 times in a 20 minutes speech, is  Sophisticated . AWS, Werner said, always had the mission to deliver sophisticated applications or services in the cloud. Now they do it. They have increased the number of objects in S3 from 50B to 359B (wow). Oracle, SAP, Netflix, all have implemented incredible sophisticated application, with  all components available in the cloud.You can store data in EU and US. If EU falls down, operate from US. If US fails down, operate from EU. AWS is colossal (it adds in 2011  daily as much infrastructure as it did in a the entire year 2000). It is so Sophisticated,  that it needs specialized companies like Snaplogic to take them out of trouble and  clients  with armies of engineers who make presentations of how they did it, that no one else among the mere mortals can replicate

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

At this point, I became dizzy: You can build sophisticated enterprise apps without making any modules in house. Just use AWS's modules.OK. But AWS' increasing sophistication adds exponential complexity. Bye, bye ease-of-use. The ease-of-use is replaced by the nightmare-to-use.

Mr. Werner talks of the new Spot Pricing and transparency of costs. He must be joking, of course. One needs a Ph.D to figure out the simple the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

Then one must figure out the updates not included in the calculator and call Snaplogic to quote a price for their services.

Soon AWS will  become the SAP company of 2011 decade. SAP , just as Grid Computing, were great technologies, that collapsed under their own weight, unless they conserve the ease of use. They should hide all the complexity under some interfaces and human easy to use screens.

I spent at Structure an evening at Cloud Camp, these guys are refreshing. Many start-ups and established companies with something to say are part of it and they offer 90% of the services Mr. Werner hints at., cheaper simpler and more reliable. The rest of the 10% will stay with AWS because the are hooked so deeply that it will cost a fortune to change providers

They have yet to learn the that True Freedom is how cloud providers will develop "easier ways" to migrate to other clouds. There is false freedom: API. If we listed to Mr. Werner advise to build "sophisticated applications" using their modules and ecosystem,  you are trapped for life.