Just wanted to quickly share a great article i've just read over at New York Times tech online, about Amazon Web Services and their EC2 cloud service. What struck me as especially worthy of a bit of attention is the fact that the article manages to do something that Amazon themselves have not quite done enough - and that is make the concept of their services highly accessible to a wider audience.
While nobody could dispute the fantastic quality and innovation of Amazon's services, some have pointed out that their branding and thus selling of them could be (even) better. The various services are mainly intended for use by business clients requiring flexible and reliable computing facilities, but preferring to go for the cost-effective option of using Amazon's cloud to get them, rather than installing in-house infrastructure.
Ranging from simple storage facilities to massively powerful processing services, AWS is currently enjoying huge popularity, especially with fledgling web start-ups. However perhaps due to the technical functionality of the services themselves - or their dry and rather mechanical naming (EC2, SQS, SimpleDB etc), the branding of these quality products has so far been a bit of an unspectacular affair.
This is why the aforementioned NYT article comes as a nice surprise - an accessible yet informative introduction to AWS, and EC2 in particular, in a fairly mainstream publication. All in all it's a positive sign that cloud computing is gradually permeating further into popular tech understandings rather than being the niche concept that it was a couple of years ago.
With Amazon's EC2 service alone currently often peaking at 80,000 requests a second it seems that the writing is on the wall (cloud?) - cloud computing is absolutely indispensible to the modern web, and AWS is a huge player in defining and developing this area. The quicker we get such concepts explained and transmitted to a wider (i.e. not exclusively tech) audience, the better on the whole for our general web literacy as an online community.
Dejan Levi
