Amazon Storage Services
I have to give Amazon some credit…they aren’t just sitting back and waiting for the future to come to them…
First there was Alexa for developers, Amazon’s offering of a pay-per-use web services interface to their Alexa search index. Not unique…not revolutionary…but certainly an innovative step in the direction of web evolution. Opening Alexa to developers broke a couple major barriers for Amazon — it was the first web services offering not based on Amazon’s transactional infrastructure and the first major web services offering to be priced using micro-payments ($0.00025 per request).
Amazon has followed up with a new web services play called S3 (Simple Storage Services), which is a web services interface to backend storage services offered by Amazon. At $.15 per GB per month of data storage (no web service fees), this is a next step in the direction of low-cost online storage, and also a step in pushing more power to the desktop. If Amazon is smart, they use this as a first step in a larger plan, perhaps something that will rival my take on Google’s storage and document management direction…