Amazon Web Services expanding in northern Virginia, plans to hire 500

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Amazon.com is expanding its footprint in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell announcing today that the company’s Amazon Web Services unit plans to open a new office in Herndon, Virginia area. The expansion could add as many as 500 engineering and IT jobs in the area, and it comes about two… Read More…

Amazon Web Services targets bigger companies, going toe-to-toe with Microsoft

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Amazon Web Services’ partner network has grown to more than 4,000 members, up from less than 1,000 a year ago — a key step for the company as it tries to expand its cloud-computing customer base beyond startups to more large companies. That’s the word from Reuters this morning in a piece on the company’s… Read More…

Amazon downgraded by JP Morgan over slower growth

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 Amazon was downgraded from overweight to neutral by JP Morgan Chase overnight, and the company’s share price is feeling the effects this morning — down about 2.8 percent to 267.50. JP Morgan’s Doug Anmuth lowered his price target to 300 from 330, saying that he expects Amazon to have a hard time growing its market share… Read More…

Electrical storms rattle Amazon Web Services, taking Netflix, Instagram and others offline

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For the second time this month, Amazon Web Services is suffering after a power outage at its datacenter in northern Virginia. “We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area. We are actively working to restore power,” Amazon.com wrote in… Read More…

Can Google outflank Amazon in the cloud? Here comes Google Compute Engine

Cloud photo via Daniel Boyd

Google is taking direct aim at Amazon.com in tablets, with yesterday’s announcement of the Nexus 7. Today, it is a completely different area where the tech titans are lining up for a fight. In a much-anticipated move, Google today unfurled a new cloud computing service that allows users to tap into the computing power of… Read More…

Amazon Web Services blames power loss for outage that’s knocking some sites offline

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Amazon Web Services is once again experiencing hiccups, suffering service interruptions that are knocking some sites offline. The problems are occurring at the company’s facilities in Northern Virginia, the same location that was impacted by a massive failure last year that gave the Seattle company’s cloud computing services a black eye. “We can confirm a… Read More…

Amazon launches new online store for cloud-based software

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Amazon Web Services is hoping to make it easier for customers to find Web-based software with today’s launch of AWS Marketplace, a new online store where customers can purchase software and pay by the hour or month. The new store features products and services from companies such as Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Zend…. Read More…

Stat of the day: A third of all Internet users visit a site that uses Amazon’s infrastructure

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Amazon.com’s lead in the cloud computing arena is well known, but just how far ahead is the company in providing the core backend infrastructure to make companies’ Web sites run? Consider this report by Wired magazine: According to research by DeepField Networks, one-third of Internet users in visited a Web site that used Amazon’s services… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Opstera looks to help clients find answers in the cloud

Opstera co-founder Paddy Srinivasan

Opstera is just four months old. But the Bellevue upstart is already reeling in customers who are turning to the $50 per month service to monitor and manage applications running on the Windows Azure platform. As of this week, more than 100 customers have signed on for the company’s AzureOps, a product that helps customers automatically… Read More…

Chart: Amazon S3 grows, with 905 billion objects now stored

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Amazon has released new numbers showing continued growth for its Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, one of the core components of Amazon Web Services for third-party web developers. Between the fourth quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012, the number of objects stored in S3 rose 19 percent, from 762 billion… Read More…