Amazon.Com

The Seattle-based online bookshop Amazon.com was founded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and became one of the iconic companies of the dot-com bubble. It faced scepticism regarding its business model and only made its first annual profit in 2003. Amazon has diversified its product lines and now included music, film, software, electronics, furniture, food and toys. Amazon also owns Alexa Internet, A9.com, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). and launched in 1995. Amazon offers web services for access to its catalogue as well as for integration with retailers like Target and Marks & Spencer. A9.com provides search engine services directly on the Amazon.com site.

The Amazon web services (AWS) were launched in July 2002. Amazon launched utility computing service S3 (a storage service) in March 2006 and EC2 (an elastic computing service) on August 2006, providing scalable virtual private servers using xen. Based on Grid computing paradigms, Amazon Web Services commercialises the internal skills developed by Amazon.com as a necessity in its retail empire.

S3 (“Simple Storage Service”) is a storage service backend for developers that offers a “highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”. S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon´s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their business becomes it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure. Virtually, any file type is allowed, up to 5GB. Files may be set as public, shared or private and the prices are: 0,15 USD per GB of storage per month and 0,20 USD for each GB of data transferred up or downstream.

Further Information

Amazon Web Services Home - http://aws.amazon.com/

Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches (14/03/2006) - www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/14/amazon-grid-storage-web-service-launches

BusinessWeek - Jeff Bezos´Risky Bet - (13/11/2007)http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.htm

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com