The Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

ENGADGET: Amazon Silk browser spins a faster mobile web, courtesy of cloud servers (video)

Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

ENGADGET: Kindle is the biggest selling item on Amazon, bests sliced bread

In order to compete with the kingpin of that space, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud, Google has bolstered its platform with new features, including shared-core instances for low-intensity chores, advanced routing, large persistent disks up to 10TB in volume size and sub-hour billing to keep costs down.

ENGADGET

Amazon first introduced the public at large to the concept of IaaS in 2006, when the company launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

FORBES: The Battle For The Cloud Is On -- Who Will Win?