It is a big week for Cloud Computing. Rackspace announced they are entering the space via acquisition. Today Amazon announces EC2 is no longer beta – which is good. The important part of the announcement for me is the roadmap they hint at.

Cloud computing keeps advancing like rolling thunder. Amazon today announced a major upgrade to its EC2 compute cloud service and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim has decided to spend more time at his startup Arista Networks, which sells 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers. And just yesterday, RackSpace announced two small acquisitions to help it better compete against Amazon in the cloud computing as well.

The biggest news today comes from Amazon, which is staking the “beta” label off of its EC2 service and announcing the following upgrades:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

[From The Cloud Is Shaping Up. Amazon Beefs Up EC2, Bechtolsheim Shifts His Attention To Arista]

The addition of load balancing, automatic scaling and monitoring services are critical barriers to wide adoption. They are the only reason I’m not using EC2 for cosinity’s servers. I will anxiously wait for these improvements to EC2.

Amazon – if you are reading this – the sooner you get those three things released in an effective management console you’ll have much more of my business.