Amazon's EC2 sounds good, but how do you make use of all that throbbing CPU power? A few companies are stepping up to fill the how-to gap. Elastra provides unlimited on-demand creation of MySQL and PostgresSQL instances for $.50/server/hour. They contend their clusters perform "nearly" as well as a local database deployed using local storage. RightScale says they "enable you to run your entire web business on Amazon Web Services with reliability, scalability and performance – and pushbutton control of complex system administration tasks." This includes web servers, DNS, and MySQL services. Prices start at $500 a month. Later I'll write more about these and other related services like 3tera, but these services are the canary in the coal mine, the face of change, the bellwether of the new data center. How we build scalable web sites is about to change.