Amazon Web Services: The Future of Computing?

[Beet]

SEATTLE — Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years’ weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.

Each of these start-ups carries out computing tasks that a decade ago would have been impossible without a major investment in computers. Both of these companies, however, own little besides a few desktop computers. They and thousands of other companies now rent data storage and computer server time from Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services division, for what they say is a fraction of the cost of owning and running their own computers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/technology/active-in-cloud-amazon-reshapes-computing.html?hpw

[John Dibble]

The company I work for uses Amazon's services - it's really great stuff. You can scale as needed quite easily.

[fezzyfestoon]

That's exciting. And very interesting, I'm definitely going to look more into this today.

[King]

Cloud computing is great at all levels.  Google has really streamlined my personal needs.  I hardly ever open anything other than web browser anymore.   

[Beet]

Follow up article:

Job Openings at Amazon Web Services Reveal Its Future

(P.S. if you ever run into the NY Times firewall, just remove the query string from the URL)

"In an article published Tuesday in The New York Times, I noted that Amazon Web Services currently lists 600 job openings...

When I checked the listings in July, there were a few openings for people needed to work on the computing side of the Silk Web browser, which comes loaded in Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. Now there are 27.

Silk has always seemed interesting because it is a browser that splits computational tasks between a local computer and the cloud. Based on this typical job description Amazon is getting ready for Silk to do a lot more than just have it load books onto Kindles. The ad asks: “Imagine the possibilities when a Web browser is powered by a vast, scalable server fleet, massive network connections, and limitless storage resources. Can you think of ways to use those assets to make the browsing experience faster or to introduce previously impossible features?”"

In the future, you might not even need a local processor to do stuff...

[Yelnoc]

Sounds like a death knell to hacker culture* and the broader Do It Yourself mentality.  No processor?  No local storage?  Cloud Computing is taken all of your information, all of your flexibility, all of your freedom and placing it in the paws of huge companies whose sole purpose is to make money.  Think about how vulnerable our computing infrastructure will be if no one has a hard copy of anything.  If the network goes down, you cannot access anything.  So many things wrong with this...if I had the energy for an effort post I could give you a wall of text.
 
*As in hacking together programs, not necessarily the malicious face painted onto computer nerds by the media.

[Beet]

It's definitely disturbing. When you combine it with all the data Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. have on you, and how much of life is migrating online, it's completely unprecedented how much information about humans is being centralized within a few massive entities that are no doubt cooperating / would cooperate with the government.

Ironic that originally the PC revolution was supposed to be all about empowering individuals (Apple's "1984" ad?) and now it's completely turned on its head.