Amazon’s relentless drive to make infrastructure management easier continues with their announcement of AWS CloudFormation.

The big problem that ordinary people (well developers and techies anyway) have with cloudy stuff is that although it is easy to start-up one server, choreographing the creation of  an entire system, for example a load-balanced, three-tier system remains difficult. AWS CloudFormation addresses this issue.

At its simplest you can use Amazon standard templates to fire up a WordPress blog on its own server. At its most sophisticated you can use your own templates to build a globally distributed geographically clustered Skynet that becomes sentient.

Over the next couple of months I will play with the Amazon cloud tools and I welcome any comments from readers who are using them. I am particularly interested in clustered Tomcat and Railo.