Wired has a new article on Amazon’s Web Services, Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today.

“Click on “Amazon Web Services.” Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center’s worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they’re set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there’s even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone. No precious cash tied up in soon-to-be-obsolete silicon, no 3 am runs to the colo cage. Outsource your infrastructure to Amazon!”

It’s expensive and a major hassle to keep a lab full of servers running, up to date and secure. As soon as you buy them they start becoming obsolete. This is a very attractive option.

Related posts:

1. Dell trying to trademark cloud computing
2. USPTO rejects Dell cloud computing trademark application
3. Can cloud computing be entirely trusted?
4. Cloud computing with Hadoop
5. Computing education is not dying, just resting before the next race