I've heard folks talk about 'the cloud' as if it is a hollow marketing term. I have to say, after playing with Amazon EC2 for a while, I am rather impressed, and am busily watching my brain twist around it.

Before, servers were expensive. Not in the financial sense, but in the sense of the amount of work that they typically took to set up (request to provider, signing documents, commissioning, then configuring, etc). Now, once you've built an image, a click of a button will have another machine available.

I look forward to seeing how this impacts on my ideas about software deployment over the coming months.