I make it a point to tell our colo providers, who charge by the rack-unit, how completely satisfied we are with the utility computing model. Our accounting department loves it too.

EC2 now is like Linux was for us a few years ago... All new systems are planned and provisioned for this new model, and mentioning it to our legacy vendors usually gets a discount from the sales droids that recognize EC2 as competition.

I've still got pleasant tingles from the IT headcount reductions that virtualization got us a few years ago, and it makes me drool to think that I can do it again with utility computing.

There's nothing new in the Elastic IP deal apart from how they charge for it.

Compaq Tru64 clusters had "application IPs" which moved from node to node as the resources were moved. We were using this technology 10 or more years ago.

Paris, because there's nothing new in this world...