Without these services, AWS is, when you think about it, only marginally different from any other Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting service (slicehost for instance).

Today AWS is truly breaking new ground: every major aspect of a scalable web application infrastructure is now virtualized, and to a substantial extent, automated. That is a paradigm shift that the likes of GoGrid have evidently foreseen but will have a heck of a time keeping up with, for sheer lack of resources and experience.

The challenge faced by Amazon Services, however, is to remain focused on what really matters to web application builders. SimpleDB and Simple Queue Services, for instance, have been available from nearly the beginning, but belong to the realm of specialized programmatic web services, not infrastructure. As such they had to fit very nicely into a specific application architecture in order to be of any use. To boot, typical web application architectures had simply no use for them. What a waste of time when the world was starving for load balancing.