AWS have owned the base cloud market with EC2 and S3.
What I find impressive is that they're continuously lowering prices competitively[1] and expanding their services in a way that makes their base offering more attractive.
OpsWorks starts to battle one of the biggest reasons to go with PaaS[2] providers such as Heroku: the difficulty of managing these services yourself.
[1]: This benefits both Amazon and the consumer. Lower prices and continuous reductions improves customer confidence in and use of the AWS platform, whilst consumers are just happy they're paying less. Heroku and Google App Engine (even VPS providers) rarely decrease prices, making AWS something certain to be considered.
EDIT: Second nitpick: AWS OpsWorks is no Heroku. Amazon's already released AWS Elastic Beanstalk, though, is supposed to replicate Heroku's functionality (there's a reason Heroku is still around, though).
Yeah, I noticed some of the similarities to Beanstalk myself and am kind of curious where they are going with this concept? It seems to me that instead of building a fully integrated Chef management platform with fancy gui (which was my initial thought), they just recreated Beanstalk with some major bonus features and perhaps a lot more control.
OpsWorks starts to battle one of the biggest reasons to go with PaaS[2] providers such as Heroku: the difficulty of managing these services yourself.
[1]: This benefits both Amazon and the consumer. Lower prices and continuous reductions improves customer confidence in and use of the AWS platform, whilst consumers are just happy they're paying less. Heroku and Google App Engine (even VPS providers) rarely decrease prices, making AWS something certain to be considered.
[2]: Accidentally wrote IaaS -- thanks Argonaut.