Amazon anounces Elastic MapReduce.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

If you wanted to do a large amount of data processing the past with EC2 you would have to setup the whole environment which can be time consuming for the first time user or over whelming just thinking about it. This will make it much easier for other companies to tackle tasks like the NY Times did when they converted a large amount of scanned articles in TIFF format into PDFs.