One would expect Amazon to guard their infrastructure jealously, but piece by piece, Amazon has been opening up their infrastructure so that the rest of us can get our hands dirty playing with file storage, virtual servers, and even physical deliveries on the same kind of ludicrous scale Amazon uses every day.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes these systems available over a web services framework so that everything from using more storage space, to creating virtual servers, to requesting physical deliveries happens over SOAP. Instead of filling in forms each time you want more, less, or a different infrastructure, your code can stay as is and AWS provides the necessary services as needed.

Each of the Amazon web services comes with tools developed by Amazon, and a growing number are developed by third parties. Increasingly, third parties are building new and complex services on top of these basic services – for example, hugely scalable databases and web indexing. Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2) provides virtual servers charged at an hourly rate from US$ 0.10 an hour, running on Amazon's huge number of servers spread across their data centers. EC2 gives you computing in a "cloud."

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