Amazon (AMZN) has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn’t rely on improved network infrastructure–instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

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The launch of Google’s App Engine, which allows developers to build a Web application and then host it on Google’s existing infrastructure, is a watershed moment in the software-development industry. The days of building and hosting your own servers, except for specialized applications, are officially over. This is good news. And App Engine will give everyone, including Amazon, a nice scare, which means that these companies will be forced to take a hard look at what they offer today, and what they need to do to improve it.

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It was a good day for Web workers who build applications. On the one hand, Google released their Visualization API, which provides sophisticated ways to display tabular data with relatively little coding. On the other hand, we have the launch of the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, which allows anyone to use Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and packers to ship physical products to their customers.

Taken together these–and other APIs that are already out there, from Google Charts to Amazon S3 and ECC–are making it increasingly possible to build complex real-world Web applications without supercoders. But there’s a threat, too: the more services you depend on, the more points of failure you have, as demonstrated by last month’s Amazon S3 Outage.

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