There was a company (cannot remember the same sorry) that provided MySQL in amazons cloud before they launched their RDS service. And an much better service it was too. The startup did not ask you to give them a 4 hour window where they can bring down your DB. But still it was an Amazon service so the brand awareness was there.

This seems like a direct attack on the likes of cloudkick. I do not understand the motivation to be honest. They were making some money from their own monitoring and not they are making none, but they are pushing companies like cloudkick away from survival and innovating more.

While the free micro instances offer was obviously a push to put the boot into Rackspace and attempt to take the remaining % of the IaaS market this I understand less.

It seems Amazon have ignored the old rules where in a new market there is less direct competition as there is plenty to go around and have gone straight for total market domination.

Disclosure: My project has(had) as a highlight feature IaaS monitoring, metrics and alerting. So if the above sounds a little unreasoned please forgive me while I contemplate a pivot. :-(

On topic - This combined with the free year of a micro instance will allow you to put a proof of concept together for only the cost of your time.

For instance, there was one site where user abuse was the real problem... Bad enough that I built something that detected possible abusive behavior and would beep my pager.

For another project we had about 20 geographically distributed mirror sites, and we had to monitor network connections to all of them and make sure they were all alive and staying synchronized.

Right now I've got a site where the caching system screws up periodically and then I start getting 500 errors. Sooner or later I'm going to really fix the problem, in the short term what I really need is something that gets in my face whenever the 500 error rate spikes.