• Wired, Wednesday, April 23, 2008 11 AM

Wired touts Amazon's cloud computing capabilities in a lengthy article about the company and its CEO Jeff Bezos. Whereas Microsoft today announced a new software-as-a-service initiative, Amazon's pay-as-you-go Web Services are commonly referred to as "utility computing", or "hardware as a service." These are pay-as-you go offerings that include storage, at 15 cents per gigabyte per month, megabyte-sized chunks of computing power that cost 10 cents per hour, virtual quad cores for 80 cents per hour, and they've even got a tool for managing your expanding iPhone library. Amazon wants your company to outsource your entire infrastructure to them.

As such, Amazon's Web Services customers are mostly businesses, pulling in "a whole new category of customers looking for rock-solid scalable computing on demand - blue-chip startups like Zillow and PowerSet, kids in garages building the next Google, even adventurous corporate IT jocks looking to offload some of the drudgery." But Amazon is a retailer, right? What does selling "cheap clouds of bits" have to do with selling "pricey stuff in boxes" Wired asks?

"That's a really good question," Bezos replies, adding: Don't listen to Wall Street. Because Amazon spent more than $2 billion piecing together "the world's broadest, deepest, smartest, most versatile global technology platform, ready for anything from running data centers to delivering cat litter," says Wired. "Now Bezos' globe-spanning empire is primed to lead the migration of computing power from the desktop to the Net." Trouble is, Google and Microsoft are hot on its trail.

Read the whole story at Wired »