Amazon Evolution
Jessy Davenport
XBIS/219
June 9th, 2013
Jenn Wolf
Amazon Evolution
Amazon’s original concept was to revolutionize retailing, even though they are the largest retailer online, they have not shown consistent profit growth they originally anticipated. The company invested over two billion dollars in the process of twelve years into building the infrastructure to house the online store and since 2007, with the knowledge that the company only uses about ten percent of the processing capacity to run the online store they decided to make use of their infrastructure available to customers to provide a series of computing, storage, and other services to help companies and individuals run the technical and logistical parts of their businesses. Three of the services offered are the Simple Storage Service, known as “S3”, Elastic Compute Cloud, known as “EC2”, and the “Mechanical Turk”. The “S3” is used to store data and applications on Amazon disk drives, where Amazon charges fifteen cents per gigabyte per month. The “EC2” rents out processing power equivalent to one basic server starting at ten cents per hour. The “Mechanical Turk” combines processing power with network of people that can do things better than machines, such as mark content as inappropriate or transcribe audio, the companies post content online and pay people and Amazon makes a ten percent commission for this service. Some data management issues that would affect companies using Amazon, is the fact that Amazon is now not only reliable for keeping their online store up and running, but responsible for other companies to run more efficiently and even perform day to day functions. In the event a company is not able to access their service online, it costs them more money can possible lose them profit for that day, yet they still have to pay Amazon
