Saw this post from Brady Forest on O’Reilly Radar, which points to the official announcement on the AWS blog. This may not mean as much to many of you who have been using S3 for a while now, but it’s big news for a guy like me because I know better than to bring technologies like S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk into any serious internal conversation unless I can say “yes” to that SLA question. Looks like AWS is getting ready for prime time. And why not? Most of us have been expecting this for a while now.

I will echo Arthur’s request for more to the SLA, specifically for stats on uptime and availability. I think that all services should provide information like this to be as clear as possible in letting you know what you are getting by consuming said service (and our internal guidelines say as much), but this kind of information is especially vital with services in the cloud. I’m confident that they’ll get there, but in the meantime, I’ll echo that feature request.

On another note, why the heck is O’Reilly charging $149 for a glorified whitepaper on developing applications for Facebook? I use Facebook. I like Facebook. I think there is something to be said about developing applications for it… in certain situations. But could we just take a moment to breathe here before they hype train carries us all away?