Amazon Says S3, Cloud Services On the Rise

Amazon Web Services (AWS) LLC, the affiliate of the online retailer, claims to be adding thousands of takers to its Web-based computing services monthly, among them a growing roster of business enterprises.

"We have 330,000 regular developers. We are adding about 25,000 to 30,000 per quarter," says Adam Selipsky, VP of product management and developer relations for AWS.

Though small businesses and startups made up the initial adopters of Amazon's AWS offerings, which debuted with the introduction of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in March 2006, Selipsky says times have changed. Sandisk, Nasdaq, The New York Times, and RedHat are typical partners these days.

Selipsky refuses to give out specific numbers of enterprise customers, or to say how Amazon's infrastructure services are doing individually. He does boast, though, that S3 now hosts over 14 billion objects from a range of customers, compared with over 5 billion at this time last year.

Apparently, no one was put off by S3's high-profile outage last month.Many enterprises also are enlisting Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, Selipsky says. That service, enhanced with multisite fault toleranace features this week, gives customers virtual machines based on Amazon's Citrix XenServer infrastructure, which can be used to buttress online applications. RedHat, for example, is using EC2 to furnish support for Linux applications on an hourly basis to IT customers.

EC2 is still listed as a beta service on Amazon's site, though Selipsky claims many companies are using it in production. Further, he notes that lots more would-be software-as-a-service suppliers are getting ready to mimic what RedHat is doing, even though he won't say more on that.

Selipsky is also cagey about whether Amazon will use any virtualization in its EC2 infrastructure beyond Citrix's. When asked, he replies with a terse, "We'll see."

We will indeed. Amazon certainly isn't alone in recognizing demand for these kinds of services. Recent announcements from IBM, Nirvanix, Yahoo, and others underscores the point. (See Yahoo Inks Cloud Computing Deal, 3Tera & Nirvanix Partner, IBM Launches Cloud Initiative, and Cloud Computing Depends on Virtualization.) Expect to see a lot more real soon.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.