Amazon's EC2 has been leading the charge into the clouds for a while now, but many of its users have been using horrible kludges to fix problems that are inherent in the system. For a while, databases were a big issue, but Amazon's SimpleDB, and the Y Combinator startup, FathomDB, have both made this less difficult to deal with. 

Another area where folks have had to hack solutions together is around load balancing. I've heard of all sorts of solutions, there: from hosting on-site load balancers that push traffic up to Amazon, to hosting load balancers inside of Amazon's EC2 itself, everyone has been futzing around trying to find a solution. It was inevitable that Amazon would have to create its own solution, however, and this morning, they did just that.

Well, actually, we're pretty sure they've been working on it for a while now, but they've finally released it to the public today. In addition to load-balancing as a service, Amazon also added new monitoring capabilities, and the facilities for auto-scaling. These are super-important aspects of cloud hosting that should help cement Amazon's place as the thought leader of cloud.

Of course, there are plenty of other players in this market, but one thing you can typically rely upon in new technology is that the guys who are paying evangelists will lead the discussions. And that's exactly what Amazon has done here: They have people in the field whooping and hollering about how great the cloud is. That makes a big difference in uptake and will actually help its competition. But you can bet that Amazon isn't going to lose sleep over said competition until Microsoft sidles up to the bar.