As I’m writing this, amazon.com is down. It’s not just me, others are twittering about it. I can’t remember the last time a major site like Amazon going down. It’s been down for a while. Amazon’s cloud services seem to be working just fine, however, as my Amazon S3 account is still accessible. It can’t be good for Bezos’ push into cloud computing if his anchor site is down.
Update: @ 3.35pm EDT it looks like amazon.com is back up. I wonder if we’ll get an explanation on the downtime.
Image via WikipediaOm Malik managed to catch Jeff Bezos offstage at Walt Mossberg’s D6 conference last week, and the resulting video provides great insight into Amazon’s cloud computing efforts. If you haven’t been following the build out of cloud computing as closely as I have, let me provide some context. Amazon introduced several computing solutions that act like infrastructure utilities. They are priced by a usage model and are highly scalable. The resulting effect has been to provide a very powerful infrastructure to both individuals and startups to build robust computing solutions on. These solutions range from simple file storage, at a very affordable 15 cents per gigabyte per month, to complex computing and database applications. What makes Amazon’s efforts so significant is that the services allow everyone to harness storage and scalability in a leasing model whereby you only pay for the ‘amount’ – of storage, database and computing power – that you use, nothing more and nothing less.
nitin badjatia 