In this article Isabel equates Amazons EC2 to a vehicles “Oh shit bars.” Which, I think, Is a very valid use of the service. But lets not overlook the dirty little secret of “web two point oh” which is: Theres a *LOT* of data to be crunched.

There… I said it. See, people dont want you to understand that its actually fairly hard to maintain a growing web2 app. This whole Idea of social networks generates a WHOLE LOT OF DATA. And storing it is less the problem than analyzing it.

You see its not very good for making money to say “Working with all this data is hard.” Even when it should be. I think VC’s (who pay most 2.0 paychecks, AFAIK) like to hear “not only is it innovative… I could train a monkey to do it its so easy” Which is a load of crap because if it were then *everyone* would be doing it, and it would be Web-17.5_release_candidate_14 — If you catch my drift.

Like I always say a database at 5GB doesnt behave the same way once it reaches 500GB, and then at 5TB it’s another beast yet again. People talk about amazons EC2 as a utility computing platform — which it is — and then describe it in terms of web hosting. I think that misses the boat entirely. Yes you could use it for your web hosting needs. And I’m sure it will be good at that. But the gap that EC2 really fills isnt that one.

Right now people are saying: “Look, its a new tree!”, and later on they’ll be wondering “where did this blasted forest come from?”, and further down the road still our children will be laughing at us saying “It’s the Amazon you old fogeys… of course its got trees!”