Amazon, Cloud Computing | featured news

Free digital copies of 50,000 CDs are being offered to Amazon customers via a service that stores the music in the cloud.

Google moved to take on Amazon.com in the fast-growing market for what the industry calls cloud services, allowing companies to run their applications and store data on computers managed by the Internet giant.

For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc.’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history. A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

Amazon.com issued a detailed account of last week's Web-services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers.

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.