I’m sure most of you have seen the news of Amazon hosting TIGER shapefiles in S3 and now in EBS. Sure I like TIGER being available for EC2 instances, but the real amazing stuff happens when you can work with OpenStreetMap XML data. That mounted up to either FME Server or some great open source tools running on EC2 really would whole open worlds up. TIGER is the low hanging fruit here, but OSM would be the icing. My mouth waters thinking about what people could do with EC2 instances chomping on OSM data. One could do the lifting yourself, but Amazon’s rates are lower than what it would cost to host it yourself and since you are already on AWS, the benefit would be huge.

Update: A couple people have asked, yes you need to have an EC2 instance to leverage the EBS TIGER data.