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Amazon and Hardware As a Service
sioux_chance writes to recommend an article up on ReadWriteWeb comparing Amazon's S3 and EC2 services with Google AdSense. (They are not the first to coin the term "HaaS" for hardware as a service.) The analogy is that Google increased the granularity of (the article invents the term "fragmentized") the revenue side of the Web business, whereas Amazon's HaaS does the same for the cost side. A comment to the blog posting points out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net has been selling fine-grained hardware capacity for years, but Amazon does bring a greater scale to the business.
the hardware isn't yours, the software isn't yours and if the censoring is any indication your data isn't yours either.
Akamai is a different beast altogether -- they're not a generic computing center, but a finely-tuned cache that gets your (mostly static) data as close to the user as possible. In fact, Amazon uses Akamai (PDF press release) to host some of their content.
The difference between Sun's Grid Computing and EC2 is that EC2 is connected to the net. This doesn't mean you can't run huge batch jobs on EC2; however, there's a lot more you can put on there (read: hosting for the Web 2.0 company you've founded in your garage, mom's basement, ...). However, EC2 doesn't give you a load balancer (yet); getting the traffic from www.your-spiffy-domain.com to the EC2 instances is still your problem.
S3 is, IMHO, the more interesting of the technologies today. Buying storage capacity these days is cheap; maintaining it, however, is as expensive as ever (perhaps moreso as clients expect higher availability, geographic distribution to minimize risk, etc.). And, if I'm too small for Akamai yet need to host some static content over a fatter pipe than I have, I can even expose it to the rest of the world through the REST interface./p.