Amazon’s new Store : Utility Computing
Amazon’s new Store : Utility Computing
CASE STUDY
· In 995 has opened as an online bookstore, then it has morphed into a virtual superstore with product offerings in 36 categories, including furniture, jewelry, clothing, and groceries and become the top online retailer in the world.
· In 2001 Amazon focused heavily on modernizing its data centers and software so that it could add new features to its product pages such as discussion forums and software for audio and video.
· In March 2006 Amazon introduced the first of several new services, with simple Storage Service (S3) and later Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon entered cloud utility computing market.
· Amazon had tremendous computing capacity, but only used in small of portion of it at any one time, so Amazon began to sell its computing power on a per usage basis.
· Amazon designed S3 to provide a fast, simple, and inexpensive method for business to store data on a system that is scalable and reliable. S3 promises 99.99 percent availability through a mechanism of fault tolerance that fixed failures without any downtime.
· From the very beginning, customers have responded strongly to S3 and EC2. Bezos targeted micro-sized business businesses and the Web startup as customer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the services have also attracted some mid-size businesses and potential big players in e-business, including MileMeter Inc., Webmail.us, Powerset, SmugMug Inc.
· Currently, Amazon’s flexible, pay-as-you-go model gives the company a competitive advantage over companies that require service contracts.
· One more challenge for Amazon is the viability of AWS itself.
· In January 2007, February 2008 and July 2008, Amazon’s S3 servers experienced significant outages, with service lost for 8 hours in July. The January 2007 problem was caused by faulty hardware installed during an upgrade, and it was resolved quickly. The July 2008 outage was more problematic.
· AWS has charmed some high-profile clients, including Microsoft, Linden Lab, and the Nasdaq stock exchange
· To better support large accounts, Amazon started round-the-clock phone support and credits if S3 availability falls below 99.99 percent in a single month.
· For now, the potential of AWS is being converted into performance mostly by tech savvy developers with financial backing.
· More than 370,000 developers, ranging from individuals to large companies have signed up. As more developers contribute and the service evolve, Amazon hopes one day to make it possible for anyone with an idea and an Internet connection to begin to put together the next Amazon.com.
Posted by seangkhun
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