Amazon CloudSearch
I just got an email announcement for Amazon's new CloudSearch service. This could be really cool if popular applications and frameworks like Wordpress, Drupal, Rails, and Django build modules/apps/extensions that interface with CloudSearch. It would be nice to have an alternative to Google Custom Search (which has gotten pretty expensive for small sites) or (in the case of Drupal) Acquia Search. I am already using Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) thanks to Django-SES. It's extremely reliable and reasonably priced.
The speed with which Amazon is rolling out these services is truly amazing. It's like every system they build to run amazon.com (the ecommerce business) is a candidate for a new AWS product. My only concern is Amazon's long term ability to support this increasing portfolio of services. No doubt they will run into Google Wave-like burnouts that will shake the well earned trust of the development community. What will they do if a service turns out to be a bad business? Will they support it at a reduced level or shut it down completely?