Amazon Begins Offering Data Center Services
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Amazon begins selling storage, computing power and other behind-the-scenes data center services. Its new web services may keep the company strong if an economic downturn hits retailers.
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Oracle-compatible database can be "rented" by using Amazon.com's Web services infrastructure.
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(InfoWorld) - Best known as an online retailer, Amazon.com has been gradually building up the number of Web services it offers to developers, with the ultimate aim of turning that operation into a profitable business. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, dubbed the company's growing move into developer Web services as "the hidden Amazon" during a keynote address at the Emerging Technologies Conference on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Cambridge campus Wednesday. About 200,000 developers have registered to use the 10 different Web services Amazon.com is providing so far, including three that Bezos highlighted in his talk -- Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Mechanical Turk is a Web service that allows developers to post questions to a large group of people to gain their insight on a particular issue. S3 and EC2 are Web services that let AmazonÂ sell excess storage and excess compute capacityÂ respectively to third-party developers. "These are all pay-by-drink services," Bezos said. "You can use and experiment." The S3 and EC2 Web services are proving particularly popular with developers at companies that can't afford to invest in huge amounts of hardware and storage that they only require on an occasional basis, to test out the scalability of their software. With EC2, a developer could pay Amazon.com $70 for continual access for one month to the computing power of one of the company's high-level servers or alternatively, pay the same amount of money to have access to 700 servers for a single hour, Bezos said. "It completely changes what's possible," Bezos said. "Everyone who's started a company wants to go directly from their idea to a successful product." Instead, the inventor faces a host of obstacles, such as lengthy purchasing decisions on what computer hardware to invest in and how to manage heterogenous environments. Bezos terms those IT obstacles as "muck" and is hoping that Amazon.com's Web services can help alleviate some of those issues. "We're working on a Web service to get rid of tax lawyers, but it's not working yet," he quipped. Amazon.com plans to make its Web services operation into "a very profitable business," Bezos said. The company intends to keep its focus on developers with the hope that third-party companies will then use Amazon.com Web services to create consumer-facing applications, he added. All of the services are work that Amazon.com has already done internally to run its own vast online operations. "The last few years, we've been exposing those things that we have to do anyway," Bezos said. "It's a relatively small step to say we're eating this dog food, we should share it with others." One area Amazon.com has had to figure out is what business model to use in selling the services. "It tickles me that we routinely send people bills for 18 cents," Bezos said. He added that such a process isn't cost effective at present, but is more about experimenting with a potential new business model.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a  widely anticipated Internet service offering movie and  television shows that can be downloaded onto consumers'  personal computers.
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Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon.com Inc. , the world's largest Internet retailer, began a digital-music download service to compete with Apple Inc.'s iTunes, selling restriction-free tracks from more than 20,000 record labels.
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Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has a loftier goal than dominating the online retail market -- he wants to help colonize space.
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SEATTLE -- Amazon.com Inc. launched a digital video downloading service Thursday, ending months of speculation that the Internet retailer would be getting into the online TV and movie business.
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Amazon.com Inc  launched an  early version of its highly anticipated digital music download  store, which is seen as a potential rival to Apple Inc's   dominant iTunes system.
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Amazon.com has officially entered into the search engine market with the launch of A9.com, a search engine that Amazon claims will make organizing and managing search results easier.
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A basic database service, though in beta testing, joins Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing and Simple Storage Service.
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Amazon, the biggest online retailer, starts a TV and film download service.
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Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday, a move analysts say represents the first hint of real competition for Apple Inc.'s market-leading iTunes.
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Amazon and TiVo said they were launching a service to deliver films and television shows bought or rented online directly to television sets.
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Amazon.com launched a video download service Thursday, ending months of speculation that the Internet retailer would be getting into the online TV and movie business.
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BusinessWeek Online - Two Internet giants are waving sizable cash prizes in two very different contests. The Amazon (NasdaqGS:AMZN - News) Startup Challenge is definitely the easier one, requiring startups to propose a business based on Amazon Web Services -- development tools for building secure online storefronts and scalable infrastructure. Amazon offers the winner $50,000 cash and $50,000 in services.
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Privately held UltraDNS Corp. says it had struck a deal to provide domain name system services to online retailer Amazon.com Inc. .