I am having a real hard time understanding what is so outrageous about this. AWS is a cloud based environment. No shit it is not PCI compliant, and that is a good thing. You have no control over what happens with your data on EC2 or on S3, the very nature of it makes it at odds with storing credit card data.

If you want to use AWS to process credit cards, use the FPS (Flexible Payment Service) that Amazon offers, that is PCI compliant, as it is Amazon who is doing the processing, not you.

I just don't see the issue here.

And lets not get confused. This is not saying that Amazon is not PCI compliant, just that you cannot do credit card processing directly (as in you are doing it, not a provider) from their Elastic Computing Cloud.

I think a good example of this is the Pastafarian view regarding pirates and global temperature. Over the past 100 years global temperatures have gone up, while the population of pirates have gone down. A nice chart can be seen here:

http://www.venganza.org/piratesarecool4.gif

However, as smitten as I am with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster the causality of global temperature increase being attributed to the decrease in the number of pirates seems silly at best.

Ubuntu is equal to Linux. That is not saying that Ubuntu is the ONLY version of Linux, but it is Linux.