ReadWriteWeb

Amazon today announced premium for-pay support packages for some of its core infrastructure services. The Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Simple Queue Service (SQS) each received the gold and silver level support treatment. The new support packages provide one-on-one support for AWS customers (24/7 via phone for gold level) as well as a guaranteed 1 hour response time and new client-side diagnostic tools.

Google has just launched Google App Engine, "a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure." This will allow startups to use Google's web servers, APIs, and other developer tools to build a web app on top of. Google clearly has the scale and smarts to provide this platform service to developers. However, it begs the question: why would a startup want to hand over that much control and dependence to a big Internet company?