Last night Amazon announced the most significant cloud development of 2009 – the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The AWS Developer Blog version is here. The importance of VPC cannot be overstated. It will literally change how enterprises think about public cloud providers and the opportunity to gain efficiency and flexibility in datacenter operations.
By integrating with the security, governance and compliance infrastructures of enterprise IT, VPC eliminates one of the primary barriers to cloud adoption for mainstream business computing. Sure, there are still going to be issues, but this was the big one.
I won’t rehash all of the offering details here. You can read them on Werner Vogels blog and TechCrunch.
The hybrid cloud is a reality. You can now integrate your internal fixed IT infrastructure with large external clouds with a high degree of integration with enterprise tools. VPC allows you to assign IP addresses, create subnets, and connect your existing data centers to Amazon using secure VPN technology. Sure, this is not the same level of connectivity via dedicated secure lines that most big outsourcers provide, but it’s pretty strong and many very smart people (including Chris Hoff at Cisco) are bullish from a security perspective.
I will think about this a bit more, but Werner Vogels makes the claim that “private clouds are not clouds” mainly because they are not truly elastic. There may be some benefits to using Eucalyptus or VMware’s vSphere in your data center, but you still need to buy hardware and install it and that’s not cloud computing according to Vogels.
One thing that’s certain, the game has changed – again! Amazon’s VPC is far and away the most significant cloud computing announcement so far this year, and I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that on December 31 it will still hold that distinction.
What do you think??
John Treadway 
Since you're including December 31st, I would place a bet on Microsoft Azure.