While you were asleep: How Amazon turned Cloud Computing into big business
By Tarry Singh at 5 March, 2009, 4:41 pm
Honestly Amazon really and truly gets it. I have been speaking to a lot of folks — folks who are running proprietary , expensive virtualization technologies to somehow find the right balance to sell the stuff cheap on to the cloud. Amazon is one of those companies that can truly grasp the server side of things and bung it all in their data centers and still keep the price so damn cheap!
Read on…
It was only natural that Amazon, once it figured out how to do it, would sell its service to developers and IT professionals. “Amazon is fundamentally a technology company,” Selipsky said, “not a bookseller, not a retailer.” As he explained, developers want an Internet service—whether it’s for hosting their website, backing up files, or processing queries and orders—that is reliable, scalable, fast, easy to use, and cheap. Instead of investing upfront in hardware, servers, and coordinating a large team, developers can use Amazon Web Services to gain access to storage and computing via the Internet cloud. “Our core tenet was, we wanted to level the playing field and make our pricing accessible to anyone,” Selipsky said. “Every time we get cost improvements, we lower our prices. And pass those savings on to customers.” (He didn’t give specifics to back this up, but Amazon charges on the order of 10 cents per hour of computing per server.)
Amazon Web Services started out in 2006 with a data-storage service, called S3. It then progressed to doing computing and processing with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Now it provides companies access to online database, content delivery, and secure payment services—as well as outsourcing of tasks through what it calls Mechanical Turk. That service uses the skills of people worldwide who sign up to complete small tasks (like classifying photos) for small payments.
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