This week, our tech reporting team is exploring cloud computing — the big business of providing computing power and data storage that companies need, but which happens out of sight, as if it's "in the cloud."
It's a timely topic, since there's a price war going on as tech titans aim to control the cloud market. Amazon Web Services, an arm of the e-commerce giant, is the reigning king of large-scale cloud services. If you've ever watched streaming TV on Netflix, clicked on a Pinterest pin, or listened to music on Spotify, you've used Amazon Web Services, or AWS.
"We delivered computing power as if it was a utility," says Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services' chief data scientist.
A decade ago, startups and other Internet companies had to set up their own data centers and computing backbones, which meant a serious capital investment up front and fairly fixed computing resources.
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