EC2 has one thing going for it

Well, Amazon EC2 is ahead in one respect -- it's good for standards to have more than one implementation.

I was rather mortified when I read about Shuttlesworth talk about adding cloud stuff to Ubuntu.. given the general overhype of it all. They are using Eucalyptus, this provides EC2 functionality on your own boxes. (Eucalyptus is developed at University of California Santa Barbara). So EC2, it simply runs Xen virtual machines, gives you a /dev/sda with your image on it, /dev/sdb with temp storage and /dev/sdc with swap space. They charge per hour, for disk use, and for network transfer. Eucalyptus is using Rocks cluster management and Xen. Apparently, in Ubuntu 9.04 you can add an (explictily unsupported) copy of Eucalyptus and try it out, and they plan to have it fully supported in 9.10 (about six or seven months from now.)

It sounds like Eucalyptus is virtually identical to EC2 for normal use, main things being no support for billing, and they honestly admit Amazon's implementation is probably more optimized.