One good service I came across recently for storage provision is AWS Integration with GroupDocs’ Document Management Solution. It offers you a new and flexible storage provision and you can store your files in your Amazon S3 bucket directly. For instructions on how to accomplish it, there is a helpful blog-post:

http://groupdocs.com/blog/groupdocs-document-management/archive/2012/09/21/announcing-aws-integration-with-groupdocs-document-management-solutions.html

Companies tend to start with AWS then move off onto their own in-house solution. The problem is that when they do this, they in effect have to set everything up from scratch. I believe up to this point, AWS only supports one virtualization layer. This may be a factor in not choosing to utilize AWS services based on projected growth of a company and if they want to still use XEN after the fact (once they move off).

AWS was built for agility, but is there such thing as too much? That may deter some future customers because it could just be too complicated as already seen today where if you do not have a dev background, you may misunderstand some of the functionality and cause more issues for yourself as a customer.

There are still a lot of possibilities like Joyent taking the reigns…Oracle could get into the mix as SUN actually came out with an AWS model 2 years BEFORE Amazon launched. The market just wasn’t ready and there is OnApp’s federated cloud which has the potential to be 50-100 times the size of AWS.

Google makes algorithms for searching and indexing web page and selling advertizing. Selling compute services is not its core strength.

Amazon was and is Retail as a Service (Retain as a Service) and it is a more logical progression for them to become IaaS given they are middle ware and can commoditize middle nicely.