Hadoop Platform as a Service in the Cloud

Other than the architecture of their multi-cluster management system, which us certainly fascinating, I found two interesting points.

1) Use of S3 as the data storage platform allows for Production, ad hoc, analytic, and "personal" clusters to all work with not only a full-size data set but the same data set. Brilliant.

2) The investigation of Amazon Redshift as a Teradata replacement. First, it validates Amazon as a new competitor to on-premise relational data warehouse implementations. Second, it would seemingly move substantially all their data to the cloud. Third, what does that mean for their other apps such as "traditional" BI? No sense having Cognos on a local server if all the data is in the cloud.