Amazon is so far ahead of the pack when it comes to the ultimate vision of utility computing that some of their recent moves toward positioning and expanding their Amazon Web Services cloud offering may seem outlandish, or even alien, to traditionalists or competitors. This week's announcement that they will begin auctioning off unused Electronic Computing Cloud (EC2) capacity to the highest bidder, a bidder who will nonetheless pay the company less than would be required for a regular EC2 On-demand or Reserve instances.

They are calling the new capability Spot Instances, suited to high-volume, but periodic, processing requirements that do not need to be executed in real time. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, as usual, has a more in-depth explanation of the service and the rationales behind it. Even more insightful, Nick Carr has come out of his reclusive hideaway and tied the motives to some of the economic realities of utility computing, again illustrating the similarities between cloud computing and traditional utility services. Taken together with his roadmap of the historical forces shaping the move to the cloud, "The Big Switch", this provides a reasonable snapshot of the cloud market from broader perspectives than most providers or consumers of those services currently enjoy.

To me, this simply is another trowel of cement in Amazon's position as the dominant cloud computing provider, a sign that they are locking up a market well before it has even fully developed. Potential competitors will have to work harder and smarter to get ahead of the curve that the company is forging.