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Amazon is kicking some serious cloud-based butt. I don't see how the competition will catch-up or keep-up. Great work.

Managed DNS like this is interesting. We keep a Slicehost account around because it's DNS manager is top-notch. When the command-line tools get better for this, it might be a good alternative.

Here's where this will rock: if I could sign up for S3, Route 53 and Cloudfront, then deploy a site entirely hosted on AWS. Use Route 53 to point the A records of my domain directly at the Cloudfront distribution and the MX records at Google Apps. Is this possible?

Yes, except you have to use CNAMEs (you're meant to point at your distribution's hostname, not its IP address) so you're out of luck if your site is foo.com rather than www.foo.com.

Also, s3 doesnt serve up index.html for folders.

But S3 doesn't even have "folders"; a bucket is just a mapping from keys (paths) to values (documents). So if you want a document at /foo/bar, just store it at the path /foo/bar.

The only special case is the root "folder" (i.e. the empty key), which CloudFront does now explicitly support: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/08/05/cloudfr....

Sounds like something Wikileaks should try...err... wait...nevermind. :)

Amazon Route 53 - The AWS Domain Name Service