Amazon sells building blocks
The Simple Queue Service that Amazon is firing up is an interesting play - it looks like Amazon wants to become part of the Internet infrastructure. Queing if fundamental to creating scalable and reliable applications of all kinds. The service allows you to use Amazon's redundant and reliable systems to provide an inbox to accept trasactions for systems that are much less reliable (read: expensive). It looks like they are just exposing a facility that they built for running their own systems. Using this, I can run an Internet application with five-nines availability out of my garage. They don't have pricing posted yet, but it is a neat idea and builds on some of their other service offerings (search, e-commerce, etc.) I'm curious to see where this leads.