Amazon.com announced yesterday that their on-demand Web Services infrastructure program is now bigger than all of Amazon.com when measured by bandwidth. And Amazon.com now is the 7th largest web site when measured by bandwidth.
“Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.”
Registered developers for the service also increased 10 percent compared to the previous quarter to 330,000. Amazon is clearly gaining in popularity as a cheap infrastructure launch pad among startups.
In a related news note, EnterpriseDB, an Oracle-database compatible database based on PostgreSQL , said in March it will begin to beta test a service they are calling the Advanced Server Cloud Edition which uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
“For us, the cloud is another platform,” EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek said. “We decided that we needed to support it, just as we support other platforms — everything from Linux to Windows. And we could see that there is a set of customers who will want to use this platform to get started without provisioning a lot of storage.”
Cloud providers like Amazon and Joyent are dropping the barrier of infrastructure costs for startups. And this foundation is sure to fuel an explosion of startups that will be able to create industrial-strength apps working on shoestring budgets.
