In 2006, Amazon.com launched several pay-as-you-go services that were aimed at the developer community: Simple Storage Service (S3) which offers unlimited Internet storage, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which lets developers create and manage virtual machine instances, and Simple Queue Service for message delivery. For the most part, these services have been fairly robust and worked as advertised. And the services have remained fairly inexpensive since they don't offer a '5-nines' guarantee SLA behind it. However, Amazon Web Services were dealt a substantial blow yesterday when it was struck with a temporary outage that reportedly took thousands of Web sites down... READ MORE