Yikes
Exponential alert!!
I always find it bizarre that Amazon, who sell books and gadgets, even entered this market. Can anyone provide a link to a good article on the subject, or a potted summary of key facts about Amazon I missed?
It started out so small, a mere 200,000 objects, with the 2006 launch of the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage companion to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute cloud. Six years later, and Amazon's infrastructure cloud is getting ready to handily bust through 1 trillion objects under management. In a blog post, …
In a nutshell, Amazon went crazy with VC money growing their automated distribution and inventory management systems at the turn of the Century (as many other start-ups did at the time), and when the dot-com bubble burst there was pressure to make money out of their existing infrastructure.
They came up with some clever marketing to convince large and mid-size corporations to hand over computer processing in their hosted environments, harking back to the days of centralized mainframe and "utility computing" back in the 1970s.
Amazon weren't the only ones, many other companies were caught by the downturned economy with large data centers with little to process.
-dZ.