Amazon cloud "doesn't come down at Christmas"

 

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By Nicole Kobie in Hannover

Posted on 2 Mar 2010 at 13:52

Amazon has publicly denied rumours that its cloud computing service is just a cunning way to offload spare server capacity from its online store.

So says Dr Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer (CTO), who made the comments during a talk given at CeBIT today in Hannover.

Describing Amazon Web Services as "infrastructure as a service", he stressed that his firm was in the cloud business to stay - not just as a sideline to its web operations.

Addressing one of the "myths" of using Amazon's cloud, Vogels said that many people believe that "when Christmas comes, suddenly all of the foundations of your [business] will be gone."

He said there was "still thinking out there that Amazon is only in this to sell off excess capacity. That's simply not true."

"We are in this business because we believe there's a huge benefit to providing these services to large businesses and small business alike," he said.

Vogels noted that the Amazon S3 cloud service now has 100 billion objects in it, up from 54 billion last year.