OK... that gets us to EC3 (which is worth one upvote for a hint)...
but what gets us to the "EC4 authentication systems" mentioned in the article? I'm still trying to figure out that one.
@+++ath0.... indeed... "could have" and "TAKEN OVER" is quite yellow -- journalistically speaking. . I guess the vultures covered their arse with the "could have" bit, but, still, Amazon might have reason to... oh, I dunno (IANAL)... be unhappy. (???)
I will say this... as an individual about to embark on some benchmarking of AWS EC2 clusters now that they've fixed the Placement Groups problem[*], the headline certainly got my attention. After reading the article, I'll take my chances. But some corporate beancounter at some point will just read the headline and cross Amazon's AWS off the list of cloud "solutions" (resulting in a loss of revenue for Amazon... etc.etc.).
SS (not sure he would maintain a permanent presence using EC2, but would certainly keep it in the toolbox for prototyping and scalability testing... and quite curious what "EC4" is about)
[*] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=78069