Amazon Introduces New Virtual Computer Marketplace

September 25, 2012

WIRED recently reported on a new service put out by Amazon in the article, “Amazon Opens Marketplace for Virtual Computers.”

According to the article, the online retail giant has historically operated two distinct services that never really fit together. One the one hand it is an online retailer and on the other it is a massive cloud service. Now, Amazon has come out with a service that bridges the gap. Earlier this month Amazon introduced an online marketplace where you can buy and sell virtual servers called Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace.

When explaining the new service, the article states:

“EC2 is short for Elastic Compute Cloud. Akin to services such as Microsoft Azure and Google’s Compute Engine, it lets you access processing power over the net — so you don’t have to buy your own physical servers. Originally, EC2 was a place where you spun up and paid for virtual servers as you needed them. But about two and half years ago, Amazon introduced what it called reserved instances. In short, you could reserve virtual server instances for use in the future — at a cheaper price.”

While Amazon is not the first company to combine cloud computing services with an online marketplace, it does seem to be a natural fit.

Jasmine Ashton, September 25, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Cloud computing, Marketing, News

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.