Amazon Web Services | featured news

What's the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services? Very little – or so says Microsoft, which has made a new commitment to match the web bazaar's pricing for basic cloud services. The price-matching announcement was made by Microsoft on Tuesday, alongside news that Redmond thinks its infrastructure-as-a-service cloud is now ready for general consumption.

For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc.’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history. A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

Amazon.com issued a detailed account of last week's Web-services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers.

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.