A couple of days behind - yet newsworthy:
ESRI announced to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV). Practically, an ArcGIS Server is hosted as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) will be available with an upcoming ArcGIS Server 10 release
later in 2010. As a current customer, you obviously need to have an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) with ESRI and an independent account on AWS to use AMIs and transfer an existing licencing scheme.
Though this rollout still is way before puberty, it clearly marks a shift away from conventional "my-LAN-is-my-castle"-setups.
As James Fee points out ...
The AMI isn’t anything special, just a Windows Server AMI with ArcGIS Server at this point.
Ol' James might be a little biased as WeoGeo yet is some small steps further into the cloud thing, already scaling services and starting to leverage the cloud potential.
