Amazon has recently introduced its Elastic MapReduce service. With it users will have the power of the Grid Computing together with the elasticity of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Having access to computing power able to perform data-intensive tasks like financial analysis, scientific simulation, etc , will no longer be dependent of a pre-tagged price. You only need to pay when you are using the service. This seems to be a very interesting service, and as Sam Johnston says, a very interesting development in the “Cloud as an operating environment”.