Currently, you can only manage your EC2 instances through the new console, but over time, Amazon will give users the ability to mange other AWS services like its S3 storage service.

Ease of Use

The new console makes it especially easy for first-time users to set up their instances on EC2. While you can choose from a bewildering array of community-created instances (think custom Ubuntu mail servers), Amazon will present you with a sane amount of 'quick start' instances and relatively conservative security settings.

Amazon also created a great screencast that walks you through creating your first EC2 instance. While using Amazon's web services was already pretty manageable thanks to tools like Elasticfox, this new console gives users an easy way to control their instances, while also allowing new users to start using EC2 without too much hassle. If you always wanted to experiment with EC2, but were intimidated by the set-up process, now would be a good time to give it a try.

On Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it's a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you'll see a video clip displayed instead.

The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor's Picks and "Best-Selling of All Time" categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.

Cooliris Should Be Flattered

The Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a "powered by Cooliris" logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn't, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual "windowshopping" itself.

It's interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.

Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to Cooliris's technology. You know what they say about imitation...

We've seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream's visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off?

Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

Amazon will continue to offer the pricing under the "pay what you use" model where there is no minimum fee or long term equipment required.

According to Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service, ""The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers."

But it's clear that this pricing change is more than a simple "pass the savings on to you" move by the company. Since the company formerly had a flat pricing plan, the new tiered pricing and volume discounts makes it clear that Amazon is looking to edge out their competition. The service now also looks more appealing to the enterprise who may have felt that, before, there was not enough of a savings to use cloud storage as opposed to host-your-own storage behind the firewall.

The new pricing goes into effect November 1st, 2008.

Box.net has been around for quite a while, but is still one of our favorite places to store documents online. Thanks to its integration with numerous online services, including Gmail, Zoho, picnick, and Scribd, box.net can not only store all your documents, but can also function as the hub of your virtual office.

One other nice feature of box.net is that you can share your files and folders with 'collaborators,' which makes it a good service to exchange files within a small business or among friends.

The storage limit for the free accounts is 1GB, which is plenty if you mostly exchange text documents or spreadsheets. Paid accounts start at $7.95 a month and include more advanced features, including 5GB of storage, a versioning system, mobile access, and 24/7 phone support.

Live Mesh

The online storage component of Live Mesh is only one part of Micorsoft's latest venture into cloud computing, but it is also one of its most compelling features at this point. Live Mesh gives you 5GB of online storage and an online desktop that looks a lot like Windows Vista. You can upload any type of file to Live Mesh, but you cannot edit any of your files through the online desktop. In the future, though, we expect Microsoft to start adding more of these features.

One of the main reasons we like Mesh is because it constantly watches for changes in the folders you are synchronizing to it and updates them automatically. In addition, you can share folders with friends, allowing you to collaborate on projects.

Live Mesh works on both Windows PCs and Macs.

DropBox

Few online storage services integrate with your desktop as well as DropBox, which only recently opened up to the public after an extensive beta test. While you do have to install a small program on your machine to run DropBox, it is well worth it. Besides setting up a folder on your machine, which automatically syncs with DropBox, you can also set DropBox up to then sync that folder with other machines, similar to Live Mesh. DropBox lets you upload any type of file, as long as it is smaller than 350MB. DropBox uses Amazon's S3 service as its storage solution and provides its users with 2GB of free storage. For $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, you can buy 50GB of storage.

One of our favorite features of DropBox is that it preserves every revision of every file. You can also easily share folders with your friends or colleagues.

DropBox supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Oosah

Oosah's main selling point is simple: you get a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for media files. One restriction of Oosah is that you can't use it for text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, which seems a bit weird, given that those types of files are generally small.

One interesting aspect of Oosah is that it accepts RAW image files from most camera manufacturers, though it automatically converts them into JPGs. You can also connect to your Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and view your images and videos from those services in one central place. Oosah also gives you Media RSS feeds and even a podcast feed for your audio files.

While we love Oosah for its general ease of use, the one aspect we really did not enjoy was the fact that uploading files seems to be unnecessarily hard. Oosah does not provide any desktop clients and while you can use the web based uploader to select multiple files, uploading multiple directories at a time is not an option.

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is the only service in this list that is not available for free - and technically, it is not even an online storage service. Instead, it provides a frontend to Amazon's S3 storage service. JungleDisk costs $20 and after that, you pay Amazon for the storage and transfer of your files. JungleDisk also lets you map your Amazon S3 storage space as a network drive on your computer, so that you can just drag and drop files back and forth between your online storage and your local desktop.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Other Services

Online storage is a competitive market. The best services integrate fully with your desktop and allow you to effortlessly upload and download files. They also provide you with an online desktop to access files from any computers and are stable and dependable. A service that does not fulfill these basic requirements is going to have a hard time convincing users to use and trust it.

There are, of course, a large number of other online storage services that we did not include in this list. BOXSTr, for example, is a great application, but it constantly bothers you with ads and attempts to sell you their premium service. AOL's Xdrive is a great service, too, but we have heard too many rumors that AOL is trying to sell the service or that they will simply close it to be able to recommend it anymore.

The one company that is suspiciously missing from this list is Google. While you can upload your documents to Google Docs, the company that has made cloud computing a household name does not have a dedicated file storage service. While rumors about the existence of a 'GDrive' have regularly appeared in the tech blogosphere over the last few year, users still have to rely on hacks like the GMail Drive shell extension to store their files on Google's servers.

What Did We Miss?

Do you have a favorite service that we did not list? Let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

Interestingly, SmugMug - an online photo and video provider - doesn't seem too concerned about the outage. It seemed almost blase about it in its blog post today:

"Historically, Amazon has been very stable. We've seen three of these in our entire history with Amazon (>2 years), including this one. I expect, like the last two, that service will be restored shortly. You can keep track of their efforts over on their own Status Dashboard.

Our faith in Amazon, and the care they take of your priceless memories, hasn't been shaken. Your photos and videos are safe - which is our #1 concern. Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon's performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we've been afraid an outage like this. I'm sure there will be more over the next few years, too.

The important thing is that they're few and far between, short, and handled properly. Every component SmugMug has ever used, whether it's networking providers, datacenter providers, software, servers, storage, or even people, has let us down at one point or another."

This almost exactly mirrors what Alex said in February. Cloud computing is a complex business, wrote Alex, and Amazon is simply the best available option:

"The truth is that we cannot do it better than Amazon. They spent a massive amount of money, talent and most importantly time, trying to solve this problem. To think that this can be replicated by a startup in a matter of months, assembled, be cost effective, and work properly is just absurd. Large-scale computing is an enormously complex problem, that takes even the best and brightest engineers years to get right."

Here's a diagram that Alex did to illustrate the concept of cloud computing:

I guess the answer to the question, how much is too much downtime, is: hey, whataya gonna do? (imagine that said in a New York accent and with a shrug).

What do RWW readers think: are these outages getting too much, or do you still cut Amazon some slack?

The Amazon S3 dashboard by Sisense is a pre-configured custom analytic dashboard. It connects with your Amazon hosted web service to provide better visuals of your service's statistics. Sisense utilizes the Amazon S3 log files to provide developers with a more visual view of their stats. You can view your data in tabular format, receive charts, review data from specified periods of time, and receive information with "Key Performance Indicators".

Future Plans and Concerns

Thus far, the company offers services for Excel, MS SQL, MySQL, CSV, OLAP, and Oracle. Versions for Google spreadsheets, and Adwords are on Sisense's roadmap for the near future. While the product is great and more than useful for developers, the biggest concern for Sisense and similar cloud based services is whether these services are sustainable if the cloud computing platforms they cater too ever shut down.

Update: We have 50 invites available for Sisense. If you'd like to try Sisense simply use "S3!W435zar@50" as the invite code.