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Amazon is providing users with the ability to run relational databases in the cloud. The service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), means that customers now have another way to use a cloud service for a function normally administered by an IT department.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for Amazon, says the new service means that RDS customers will not have to deal with "the 'muck' of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business." RDS will take care of the headaches such as patching and IT administration of the relational database.

Amazon announced today that it is bridging two of its web computing services, EC2 and S3, with Hadoop, an open-source project that brings the same distributed data processing power as Google's MapReduce. In fact, it is calling the new service Amazon Elastic MapReduce. The new service will allow its EC2 customers to perform distributed MapReduce queries on enormous datasets stored in S3, paying only for the computation time they need.

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company's newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon's cloud computing service.

We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

Google today finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google's App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure and, until today, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting today, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.

Amazon today announced its new web-based AWS Management Console, which makes it very easy for users of Amazon EC2 cloud computing service to set up and manage their servers. As cloud computing companies are starting to offer a relatively standard set of features and uptime guarantees, user-friendly interfaces are clearly a way for service providers like Amazon to differentiate themselves from the competition.