[aaronblohowiak]

You're right in that they take care of the hardware part and the hardware provisioning part.

Even with EY you have to administer anything non-standard yourself (at least that was my experience with a former employer.)

I am saying that Amazon takes care of "only the hardware part" in the same way that a trucking company might lease its trucks. Sure, maintenance, part fulfillment, repair and truck acquisition are taken care of by the leasing company, but the bulk of the business is in the logistics and operations.

I am pro-EC2 for a large class of problems, and just recommended cloudfront/s3 to a friend last night. But some people have this fantasy scenario where the cloud is a magical place where applications can live and scale horizonatlly, and the reality is that Amazon offers a very good starting ground on which to build and administer your systems. (As you know.)

I think we're largely in agreement. I apologize for minimizing the amount of legwork that Amazon takes care of for you in an attempt to stress the amount of work that still remains.

[rjurney]

This interchange is the model of informative civil discourse.