Jeff hasn't even started talking yet, and I'm already excited. A year out, and his talk was definitely my favorite from last year's XML DevCon.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) was the first real XML/WS application that I had seen which lived up to the XML hype. Up until that point, I was familiar with XML as something to be abused by developers who think it's cool to create ginormous angle-bracket delimited text file databases, and something to be abused by developers who think it's cool to use WS to cross machine boundaries when there are other technologies which are much better choices for the purpose.

Jeff's talking now about the AWS (Amazon Web Services) timeline - when everything started, what features were available by a given time frame. They've just recently put out what is effectively version 4.0 of AWS (now renamed and rebranded in a supremely stupid move by marketing, but let's forget about that for the moment), and the stuff looks hot. I think it's time to start playing with this stuff again.

The talk is just about over now, and I just realized that I've been completely wrapped up in what Jeff's been saying. Overall, this talk wasn't much different from last year's (there was a lot of "What are Web Services?" and "What is AWS?" type stuff), but the few new tidbits were worth it.

Here's the deal:

- You know what Amazon is

- You know what web services are

And that's all you need to know.

Check this stuff out, yo'.