These cloud and web hosting customers appreciate the cost savings associated with a lower cost infrastructure, yet still want to deploy a server-class product with reliability and security features and server OS certification.
EBay, for instance, has reduced the number of server configurations it will deploy down to two. (Before it had 200 to 300 server configurations but 15 configurations accounted for 80 percent of the total population.) EBay now has a High Performance Computing server designed to handle transactions.
The immediate consequence here is that Amazon EC2 customers will need to deploy copies of the same server instance in multiple regions to guarantee 100% system uptime, assuming, of course, that the wildly unlikely scenario that multiple Amazon cloud computing regions experience outages at the same time never transpires.