Silver lining

摘要

In 2004 Amazon, then a $7 billion-a-year online retailer, was starting to build up a technology infrastructure to serve other companies as well as itself. Ten years later, Amazon Web Services (aws), launched in 2006, is adding enough servers and other gear every day to power the Amazon.com of ten years ago. This breathtaking investment has kept aws the market leader in the expanding business of cloud computing, which allows firms to lease storage and processing capacity from others, rather than buy and maintain their own servers and data centres. The cloud promised to be revolutionary: it would be cheaper, would keep software more up-to-date and would encourage more collaboration.