Amazon's storage and compute services (S3 and EC2 respectively) are widely seen as game changers. So, almost one year on from EC2's launch, why is it that there are no competitors in this space? One commenter on Artur Bergman's post entitled Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA made the good point that a "competitive utility computing market" would effectively solve any disaster recovery problems, and make such services even more popular.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports a rumour that Amazon will offer a MySQL web service by the end of the year.