This looks really interesting! -Basically Amazon are offering pay-as-you-go computing. Each instance is equivalent to a physical server with 1.7 GHz Xeon CPU, 1.75 GB RAM, 160 GB of local disk, and 250 Mbps of connectivity. You even get root access. Prices are:

* $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).
* $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

I haven't spent much time looking at this, but as far as I can see you create an 'image' on a computing instance, and then use web-service APIs to dynamically use it to bring up more instances as demand dictates. Unfortunately I'm too late for the limited beta. bah.