Google Plans to Launch BigTable as a Service

Google's BigTable might be open to the public soon, so says TechCrunch, essentially competing directly with Amazon's recently launched SimpleDB.

BigTable is a massively scalable database and it is what Google uses for over 60 of their own applications including Google Maps and Orkut.

BigTable allows Google to have a very small incremental cost for new services and expanded computing power (they don't have to buy a license for every machine, for example). BigTable is built atop their other services, specifically GFS, Scheduler, Lock Service, and MapReduce.

This is a huge move from Google that I hope we see more of in the near future... is an EC2 clone on the way?