For the last few years I’ve been hearing about Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing initiative. It intrigues me because isn’t Amazon.com just another e-commerce provider? As it turns out they aren’t an e-commerce company. They are a tech company financed by a very successful e-commerce website. So what does that mean Amazon really does? Utility computing and services.

Utility computing and services? What on earth is that? In short, it means that Amazon’s core competency is in delivering scalable computing architecture and related services around it. Still lost? Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

Let’s backtrack to last year when Ideastone used Dreamhost and Mediatemple for hosting, I was confronted with a problem. Running certain kind of apps required a combination of root access and other weird configuration problems to be able to really do what I wanted the system to do. So, I tracked down the virtual private server from MediaTemple as a good solution to run the apps needed. Admittedly, it’s a pretty cost effective solution at $50/month.

However, you have to manage the server yourself. Unless you’re a trained unix sysadmin, that can be quite daunting. As an app developer I just don’t have time to care about setting up a mail sever, domain mapping, etc., but I realize they are important to handle properly and they need to get done for the business to function properly. So, getting email setup was quite the chore until I found Google Apps.

Google Apps provides email, calendar, wiki, document sharing, and even simple web hosting for your company. I tried it and I’m completely hooked. Having Google manage my email just makes more sense than doing it myself. Security, redundancy, and UI should be left to the experts because Ideastone just can’t afford the kind of quality people that Google has to do those things.

Now, months later Ideastone is testing out the Google App Engine for developing some future apps. Thus far, I’m extremely impressed and surprised by what Google is becoming: a utility company. It’s a brilliant move for them. Managing infrastructure kills productivity. Not only that, but if Google can do it better for cheaper, it saves money.

So, in retrospect, if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably build everything on top of Amazon’s EC2 or Google App Engine platforms. Between the two you have all the infrastructure you’ll ever need. Going forward I’m thinking that Ideastone will definately be looking to grow toward these interesting new platforms. Sure, we won’t be abandoning MediaTemple anytime soon, but if something we build goes big, I’m sure it will be standing right on top of EC2 or AppEngine.