The cloud is just a vast mass of computers connected to the internet, on which people or companies can rent processing power or data storage as they need it.<\/p>\n
All the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research\u2014some six times Google and Amazon\u2019s combined annual revenue last year.<\/p>\n
When that time comes, all the world\u2019s business IT needs will be delivered as a service, like electricity; you won\u2019t much care where it was generated, as long as the supply is reliable.<\/p>\n
Way back in 2006, Amazon had the foresight to start renting out portions of its own, already substantial cloud\u2014the data centers on which it was running Amazon.com\u2014to startups that wanted to pay for servers by the hour, instead of renting them individually, as was typical at the time.\u00a0<\/span>Because Amazon was so early, and so aggressive\u2014it has lowered prices for its cloud services 42 times since first unveiling them, according to the company\u2014it first defined and then swallowed whole the market for cloud computing and storage.<\/span><\/p>\n Even though Amazon\u2019s external cloud business is much bigger than Google\u2019s, Google still has the biggest total cloud infrastructure\u2014the most servers and data centers. T<\/span>ests of Amazon\u2019s and Google\u2019s clouds show that by one measure at least\u2014how fast data is transferred from one virtual computer to another inside the cloud\u2014Google\u2019s cloud is seven to nine times faster than Amazon\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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