Published 2006-03-15, https://web.archive.org/web/20061127141948/http://www.bitgain.com:80/
Techcrunch has an interesting post on a new service from Amazon called S3 (Simple Storage Service). According to Techcrunch "[..] it is a storage service backend for developers that offers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs?.
Interesting twist: Amazon is not going to push S3 to end-users. Instead it is a service geared towards the developer community. This is a very, very interesting development. Just like Google, Amazon has a massive grid computing platform on which its main service runs. For Google it's search, for Amazon it's selling goods. Both companies are discovering they can do much more with this platform. Google is pushing out new services like crazy (mail, maps, calendar, etc) and now Amazon is following suit (and where is eBay? Still counting how much money they have left in the bank after their $4B "VoIP development project"?).
To me the introduction of the S3 service marks a milestone in the web services revolution that is going on. This service will be followed by many other services, effectively wiping out a whole bunch of companies. Imagine this: Amazon/Google/Yahoo might launch the following services: (I've picked software applications that are used by companies that help you and me every day.)
Global hospital information management service: conforming to standards like Health Level 7 (HL7), state and national requirements, privacy etc. Finally a doctor in the US can obtain the patient record entered by a doctor in Italy.
Global accounting service: how hard is it to create a web service that contains the fiscal business logic of the top 40 countries in the world? The service doesn't have to provide the user interface, but purely the back-end business logic and storage. Companies like Quicken (or the Dutch company Exact) would still offer the GUI front-ends but part (or most) of the internal logic is transferred to the online accounting service. A Wikipedia-style collaboration model can be used to feed the system with the constant changes in legislation.
Global news room editing service: creation, editing, management, publishing and storage of (multi-lingual) news articles and video clips for use by newspapers, TV and radio stations and web portals. They offer the tools and make the content searchable and act as a syndicator. Result: the end for many CMS vendors.
Other examples of services that can be turned into global, generic web services are cross-border citizen alerting systems, reservation systems (airlines, rental cars, hotels), utility billing systems (gas, water, electricity), telecom billing systems, Enterprise Resource Planning systems.
I'm not saying that Amazon/Google/Yahoo would offer the total solution, but just the basic, say, 60%. This 60% represents the generic part, the part that every company in the world needs. The remaining specific 40% can be added by local developers ("integrators"). But these developers don't have to worry anymore about up-time, fail-over, load balancing, scalability, back-up etc. I'm curious what the first applications based on S3 will look like. It's an exciting time.