Had first play around with Amazon EC2 today. Its great but it needs few things to really make it fly (these could be provided by Amazon or third parties).
- Decent key management tools (preferably linked to smart card or USB storage devices)
- Web based management interface
- Swing based graphical tools to augment the command line tools
- DNS management to allow allocation of sensible names to the nodes
- Network monitoring for all live nodes (liveness, CPU load, disk space at least)
- Scalability infrastructure that adds new nodes based on thresholds set by user and removes them in the same way
- S3 filesystem integrated directly into Linux Kernel
- Diff tool to compare two AMI images for differences
- The ability to load and store AMI images somewhere other than S3
- Support for Windows and OS-X images
Copacetic 
I’d like to see a way to get charged partial rates for partially-used nodes, based on CPU usage, too; that way I could keep a backup EC2 node running, and pay only for when I need to use it.
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