Recently Amazon Web Services has launched the AWS Marketplace. It is certainly a welcome move that brings all the available software on Amazon EC2 under one roof. This is especially good for ISVs to get visibility and become more accessible to potential customers. The interface inherits the classic look and feel of Amazon shopping experience and has close resemblance to the Amazon Appstore for Android. The analysts and the media have responded very positively to this move from Amazon. While this is appreciated by the Amazon partner community, there are some facts that the AWS customers should know.
The Cloud is not just about Compute
AWS success is primarily attributed to the mature Web Services that help customers build scalable, reliable and available applications. In fact, Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) were one of the first services to be offered by Amazon before announcing the wildly successful Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Storage offered in the form of Amazon S3 is very popular among developers and startups to tackle the ever-growing needs of data driven applications. SQS is leveraged by many applications to decouple the dependencies and to achieve the scale of web applications.
