Amazon S3 keeps getting better, now supports versioning

A good thing really can get better! Amazon S3, perhaps the most well-known cloud computing infrastructure service, just got another upgrade. The simple storage service now supports versioning:
Versioning provides an additional layer of protection for your S3 objects. You can easily recover from unintended user errors or application failures. You can also use Versioning [...]

Mountains of data, right at your fingertips

Last week, two announcements caught my eye. The first was from Amazon.com, which announced that there is now more than 1 TB of public data available to developers through its Public Data Sets on AWS project. The second was from the New York Times, which announced its Newswire API, providing access all NYTimes articles [...]

Amazon Web Services: Still getting better

I often think back to 2006 when Dickson and I were in the midst of the VenturePrize business plan competition. It was around that time that Amazon.com launched their first web service, the Simple Storage Service (S3). It had a huge impact on our business, and we’ve been extremely happy customers ever since.
Over the [...]

What if Twitter had been built by Amazon.com’s Web Services team?

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now, and I can’t remember a period of downtime quite as bad as the current one. Features have been disabled, and there’s no ETA for when everything will be back to normal. Who knows, maybe it won’t ever be. Which got me wondering about why Twitter’s [...]

Maybe Microsoft should buy Amazon instead

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal continues to be the hot topic in the blogosphere right now, with Techmeme still dominated by related discussion. The latest news is that Google has posted an official response to the proposed takeover. In general, discussion has moved from “can you believe what just happened” to “this deal with fail/succeed because…” If [...]

More on the Amazon Kindle

Now that Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader has actually launched, there is a lot more information available out on the web. And after reading a bunch of it, I am less excited than I was yesterday. Here are a few links that may be of interest if you’re curious about the Kindle:

More details about the Kindle [...]

The Amazon Kindle

Amazon.com is venturing into the hardware industry on Monday with the launch of their new ebook reading device, Kindle. The image I have included to the right comes from a September 2006 post at Endgadget, so I have no idea if that is just a prototype or if it is a reasonable representation of the [...]

Amazon now offers an SLA for S3

Amazon announced on Monday the launch of an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, for the S3 web service. The lack of an SLA has always been cited as a “shortcoming” of S3, but I don’t know exactly how many customers have requested it. Enough for them to offer it I guess:

Basically, we commit to 99.9% [...]

New Pricing for Amazon S3

Late last night Amazon sent an email to S3 customers announcing an upcoming pricing change. Storage costs will remain the same, but the price for bandwidth is going to change:

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB – uploaded
$0.20 / GB – downloaded
New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data [...]

Amazon EC2

I’ve been meaning to post about this for some time now, but haven’t had a chance. I was really excited last Thursday when I read about Amazon’s new web service called “Elastic Compute Cloud” or EC2 for short. After seeing what they did with S3, I was particularly interested in the how EC2 would fit [...]

eBay+Skype – What about Amazon?

The big story today in the world of technology (or M&A, depending on how you look at it), originally reported in the Wall Street Journal, is that eBay is in talks to buy Skype for, get this, $3 to $5 billion (yes billion). Seems like anything but a match made in heaven to me. Mark [...]

Amazon.com to open digital music store?

Right now this is speculation at best, but Amazon.com appears to be readying a digital music service to compete with iTunes, among others. Honestly, I am surprised it is taking so long. The world’s largest marketplace, and yet no music service.

Ecommerce giant Amazon.com appears to be preparing a digital music service to compete with Apple [...]