Given the plethora of AWS services, the author may have been referring to S3 or RDS. The whole piece read like fire and brimstone, so I wouldn't necessarily give it the benefit of the doubt. There's plenty of other hyperbole in there, gems like:

> [Amazon lets] you use [EC2] for pennies per hour.

The author's probably referring to micro instances; everything else costs upwards of a dime. For large scale deployments, EC2 is everything except cheap.