This has been a big week in cloud computing.  Most importantly, Amazon removed the “Beta” label from EC2 and is now offering an SLA for EC2.  This is essential for businesses that want to move core systems onto EC2.  As I have stated before, though, EC2 is not really a cloud platform in and of itself, rather a highly advanced server provisioning infrastructure.  Amazon also took several steps towards moving closer to a true cloud platform.  In particular, they have added support for load balancing and automated scaling.  Both of these are key ingredients for running a platform such as 10gen which completely abstracts servers for the majority of applications.  I have not yet had a chance to read up in detail on how these have been implemented, but was intrigued by one line on the AWS blog which indicated that load balancing and scaling were exposed as web services which makes the programmatically accessible for others.  That’s the right way to do things.  And yes, they are also offering Windows support now, but so what.  The other big announcements this week came from Rackspace which acquired Slicehost and JungleDisk.   Rackspace has a bit of a piggy bank from the IPO, albeit much smaller than they had hoped for (the IPO raised $200 million which was half of the original plan).  Whether or not these acquisitions are smart remains to be seen.  They could be if Rackspace can cheaply acquire customers and move them to their Mosso platform.  There are two big ifs in that sentence.  With margins being compressed it’s hard to know if you bought something cheaply and migrating customers to a single platform can be painful (maintaining multiple platforms will kill you on support costs).  It is also possible that these companies have real technology that Rackspace can use for Mosso, but here too one has to worry about the substantial integration risks.  I sure hope that Rackspace succeeds because competition will be healthy and we would like to see many different places where folks can run 10gen.