We planned on discussing persistence in this article but, like all good plans, flexibility is key. We frequently get asked if Amazon Web Services are here for the long haul. Some companies worry about committing and investing in AWS if Amazon itself isn’t doing the same.

AWS is the third major business investment after retail and marketplace for Amazon and they continue investing in AWS. As evidence of this investment, and the innovation it brings, Amazon launched two new products in the past week. These new offerings, ElasticIP and Availability Zones, provide failover in the case of service loss from a single Amazon instance to an entire data center.

Amazon isn’t the only player in this game. Microsoft, Rackspace through their Mosso offering and recent entrant Google are all trying to grab a piece of the cloud. Microsoft’s cloud offerings are distinctly different and geared toward small and medium sized businesses. Their on-demand Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL services place them closer to software as a service (SaaS) providers vs Amazon’s utility computing infrastructure. Rackspace offers on demand computing and storage with both an SLA and support however it comes at a price—experimenting with some common scenarios we found AWS to be roughly half the price of Mosso.

On April 7th, Google released their cloud computing offering “Google App Engine”. App Engine is a very early beta limited to 10,000 users and is clearly targeted at AWS. Google offers utility computing and unlike AWS, persistence is seamless. However App Engine’s scaling training wheels may have gone to far.

Currently App Engine applications can only be written in Python. Google has taken the responsibility of scalability but in doing so have reduced the level of control required to run your applications in a production environment. Monitoring, maintenance, administrative configuration cannot be done through typical means. Beta users are restricted to free accounts and costs for delivering production applications are currently unknown. Before App Engine is ready for prime time, the training wheels will need to come off.

Amazon is continuing to invest in AWS. Other players are entering and validating the cloud computing market each with their own twists and tradeoffs. If you are looking to use hosted applications, Microsoft services are the way to go. AWS offerings are cost effective, practical and more mature then competitors. More than 330,000 companies are using AWS to deliver their internet scale solutions. AWS is here to stay.