AWS webservices - you need a community!
One thing I wish AWS did better is create a community or marketplace for other AWS users. Right now Amazon basically is the only one making the services in their cloud. Charge by the hour data storage: cool. Charge by the hour database queries: cool.
But let’s say I want to buy image thumbnailing processing by the hour. No dice. I can maybe do some 3rd party negotiations, or buy an AMI that does that and pay through devpay but that is hard and annoying and not even really possible with their current payments framework.
AWS needs a slick Appstore, I need to be able to buy with 1 click (they own the patent you know), and I want to pay only by the hour and have an HTTP interface with AWS standard docs.
That being said, there is already some small movements around 3rd party value adds on AWS, this tarsnap thing for the criminally nerdy, jungledisk, etc.
One thing I would really like offered on AWS is a data pooling service. It would work exactly like Amazon S3 and have the same API but only charge you the full data storage rate for unique data. If you uploaded data that matched a pre-existing checksum, your rate is reduced to the shared cost with everyone else. It could also reduce upload transfer rates: just send the sha1 hash along, no need to upload if it’s already there. If 15 other people saved the same 1gb file, instead of paying $1.80 a year for example you would pay $0.12.
The service doesn’t even need to charge! Just take any fractional pennies from the splits off the top, ala Superman III :D
