Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business.

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

On the one hand, they have the promise of scalability of public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

FORBES: 3 Amazon Cloud Myths Dispelled

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which rents computing capacity in its giant data centres to customers, has also won a reputation for being cheap.

ECONOMIST: Amazon: The Walmart of the web | The

Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis.

FORBES: Why WikiLeaks got the boot from Amazon

Delivering on the portability promise also addresses the critical issue of interruptions and back-up recovery, as we recently saw with the high-profile Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.

FORBES: Your Music is Moving to the Cloud. What About the Rest of Your Business?

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 Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a highly scalable service for transcoding video files between different digital media formats.

ENGADGET: Amazon wants to make your hi-res videos mobile-friendly with Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Web Services has already announced its reserved instances marketplace, essentially an eBay for selling off unused portions of pre-purchased AWS computing services.

FORBES: CloudNOW unveils its 2013 cloud computing predictions