This week I observe that the guys at Enomaly have developed an Amazon Machine Image so that Alfresco can run on the EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. Eventually Enomoly are planning to provide Alfresco hosted appliances using Amazon web services as the backbone. The are also applying this same approach to providing Drupal, Typo3 and a few other solutions using an application service provider model.

This is just one of many example of utility computing taking off in the marketplace. Here's an interesting case study I came across showing the sort of savings a medium sized web company made by moving from a local datacentre to an AWS infrastructure..