So you have your great new application utilizing all the awesomeness of Amazon AWS? How you gonna sell it?
There are vague definitions of what is a cloud service and one of the prerequisites was that you could buy the service with your credit card and to pay only for the resources you use. Amazon DevPay allows developers to sell their AMIs (with application installed), all you need is a business in the US.
There are two ways how you can use DevPay: through AMIs you have built with the service installed and also by selling an application which uses S3 as the storage location. It’s a really good start, but still lacks a few things, like if you actually would like to provide high availability for the client who bought your AMI, the client will have to roll their own solution to achieve this. I bet in principle not many clients are willing to do that and would just like the application to be available.
When I think about this dilemma, a solution might be to have some kind of a root AMI which a customer would buy (and pay by the hour like crazy). This would then take care of the availability of the service by seeding new servers which are members of the application through some very wicked autoconfiguration. Actually, Elastra does almost this as their product allows the user to define architectures and then deploy them to Amazon. In principle, it would be possible to have an Elastra AMI with some configuration inside which the client could then deploy, but it does sound like a hack and not really something you could sell as a product. By the way, the Elastra’s product looks great for defining and deploying architectures at least internally within an organization.
The seeding of an application from a root AMI might make clients able to buy a redundant application and not pieces of it. So far, though, this is just a beautiful dream since the DevPay is not available in Europe so it isn’t possible to start with even the simplest model of serving an AMI of your superduperapp for the public. That is, if you don’t implement billing yourself. If I’m not totally wrong, the billing API is not public which makes rolling out your own solution impossible (you can’t either put limits based on usage charges in your account due to this reason).
I would be willing to adjust the definition of a cloud service regarding the pay by the hour and order by credit card before DevPay is available in Europe.
