Amazon is launching another Limited Beta, which seems to be the only way to launch anything these days.

This time they build on the S3 success, and add the next obvious component to the equation: Computing on demand, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

As with S3, you get what you pay for and vice versa, no signup fees. S3 is used (and paid for separately) to store the computing images, and the EC2 additional pricing seems at first glance to be quite reasonable:

• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).

The bandwidth cost might be an issue, but depending on what you want to compute, it might not a problem.

I could envision running some serious reasoning on a thing like this…