Elastic Compute Cloud: How Amazon Unleashed the Power of Computing
By Karla Robinson
November 29, 2012
November 29, 2012
- Amazon made a name for itself selling books and DVDs and has since become the world’s largest online retailer. But the company has also become a top player in the computing business, running as much as 1 percent of the Internet on its Amazon Web Services (AWS). The secret to Amazon’s success: offer services that customers will want to use.
- Amazon created the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which started as an experiment and evolved into “an Internet service that has completely changed the face of computing since it debuted a little over six years ago,” reports Wired. EC2 provides consumers instant access to unlimited computing power.
- “With EC2, you can use all that computing power to run just about any software application you like,” the article explains. “Rather than loading your software on physical computer servers you’ve set up in a closet or a data center, you can load it onto virtual servers you’ve set up in your Web browser. And whenever you need more virtual servers, you can have them.”
- “Part of the genius of EC2 is that it gave software developers virtual machines that behaved a lot like the physical machines they were familiar with,” the article continues. “They could run the same sort of software they had always used. Amazon didn’t try to tell the customer what he wanted.”
- Google and Microsoft were quick to come up with competitors: the Google App Engine and Windows Azure. “The learning curve was steeper, and the public never really embraced them in the same way,” Wired says of the other services.
- “Amazon is now well positioned to fend off the competition. [AWS CEO Andy] Jassy says that Amazon didn’t necessarily plan it this way, but EC2 and the other Amazon Web Services are businesses of low margins and high volume — the kind of businesses that Amazon knows better than anyone else trying to play the cloud game.”
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