Amazon's EC2 virtual Computing resource service has ended its beta phase and is now available to all developers, according to Dan Farber at ZDnet.

The service, particularly in combination with Amazon's companion S3 storage service, has been intriguing and has a considerable amount of theoretical promise, but hasn't really shown any overwhelming breakthrough utility just yet. But betas are for working out the kinks, not necessarily coming up with killer apps, and as Farber points out, given the overall direction of the market, the Amazon Web Services could well eclipse the rest of the business in terms of size and profit.

Of course, just out of beta doesn't necessarily mean stable and proven-this is still essentially a 1.0 product release, so it's worth waiting to see how early adopters fare. On the other hand, the availability, at reasonable rates, of such flexibility and power is certainly something to be considered for hosted application services.