Amazon Beefs Up Its Cloud Ahead of MS Announcement

Amazon has announced several major improvements to its EC2 service for cloud computing. The service is now in production (no longer beta); it offers a service-level agreement; and Windows and SQL Server are available in beta form. ZDNet points out that all this news is intended to take some wind out of Microsoft's sails as MS is expected to introduce its own cloud services next week at its Professional Developers Conference.

Comments

Re:What is it?

[FredFredrickson]

To expand on this, because now you've made me research this, basically cloud computing refers to hosting business applications remotely- typically, but not neccessarily, on multiple servers. (Such as an application server, a sql server, and so on)

"But I already have my business software hosted on an application server, and it utilizes a seperate SQL server... how is this any different?"

Is it stored somewhere offsite, say, by a hosting company?

"Why, yes.."

Then welcome to the cloud computing club!

But I've been doing this since the late 90s, I'm confused, what's changed?

Nothing at all. It's just like podcasts and web 2.0, another useless name for downloading audio files and websites that are more clever than before.

So basically, the only difference between remote hosting and cloud computing is whether or not you understand what's underneath the hood. If you're not sure how it works, but it just does, it's called "the cloud" otherwise, the rest of us call it "Shared hosting," "VPS," "Colocated," or "Dedicated" offsite hosting.

It's kinda like using the word magic instead of the word science. Makes people feel better.