2. Examples of cloud services

2.1 Amazon's offer remains the benchmark

Amazon remains the benchmark for cloud computing offerings, with a wide range of Amazon Web Services (AWS), some of which are free:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud-based data storage offering; Dropbox and Ubuntu One are among the services that rely on an S3 infrastructure;

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a set of PaaS offerings, with a wide choice of operating systems and installed software;

• Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a SaaS offering for the analysis of large volumes of data;

• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) is an oxymoron, since it offers...