Amazon DevPay Graduates to General Availability

Amazon DevPay just transitioned from beta to general availability. If you aren't familiar with this Amazon Web Service, Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services. It is designed to make On-Demand business models and implementations easier for developers.

That DevPay is "Going GA" is especially exciting to me, because I believe that it enables one of the biggest business opportunities ever: selling your software on a per-hour basis, leveraging Amazon's on-demand business model.

Some outstanding DevPay examples are already in production. One of the oldest and best known is Red Hat's RHEL 5.1 offering in the cloud. For a small monthly fee, plus a modest hourly rate (as low as $0.21 per hour), organizations are able to run fully-supported RHEL without purchasing an annual subscription.

Wowza Media Systems offers a an interactive RTMP server for streaming Flash video and audio, also with on-demand pricing. Innovation on Amazon EC2 is a real win for both Wowza Media and for people or organizations who want to deploy a media server.

DevPay also supports developer applications that leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (also known as Amazon S3). For example, SmugVault is a service from SmugMug that adds storage of other file types for users of their popular photo sharing and storage service. As with Amazon EC2 AMIs, DevPay enables developers to set their own price for the underlying Amazon storage service.

So I'm going to plainly state that if you haven't considered how to build a business on top of Amazon DevPay, you should. Every so often a disruptive innovation comes along: Amazon Web Services is a great example of disruption. DevPay takes disruption to the next level by enabling on-demand business models on top of AWS. Better yet, Amazon takes care of all those nasty billing and collection details; you receive a monthly payment that represents your revenues for the month, minus a very small commission.

-- Mike

Comments

[Martin]

Does General Availability means that everybody around the world can use it?

[Jorge Oliveira]

Great news. When will it be available outside US?

[Reuven Cohen, CTO Enomaly Inc]

GA for USA, how about some Canadian love!

[William Blanchard]

DevPay has been a godsend for us and this is the best Idea of AWS since deciding to offer AWS to begin with.

[Kilian]

when europe??

[mludvig]

Like the others I'm longing for the outside of US availability. Any ETA on that? Or is it not going to happen in a foreseeable future?

[Robin East]

so it's January 2011 and according to the information on DevPay you still have to be able to do business in USA to use DevPay. Is this going to change? Seems amazing to me that a potentially great product has such limited availability.

[Mehmet Batuhan]

Is it possible that DevPay didn't get the attention it needed from the developer community that it has been put to back burner? DevPay has been missing many critical features and it has not been enhanced or even touched for almost two years. Sometimes you wonder if there is no dedicated resource for DevPay and it is just sitting there until something really breaks. Pretty sad...