[ordinaryman]

Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota.

$0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.

You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. // Same as in GAE.

This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.

[tybris]

I actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine. I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE has.... who?

What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and so they do.

[ordinaryman]

To add to it, it is not that I want to switch from GAE to AWS now. But, to know that it will be easier in case I need to, makes it good news.

I also believe competition which facilitates such migrations not only validates the space and the standard (write for GAE, you can host it on Google or on AWS), but also helps drive innovation and service levels.

[watchandwait]

It will be interesting to see how Gmail treats email messages from Amazon SES.