One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice.

These problems affect companies of all sizes and are as relevant to an enterprise trying to shave costs as they are to a start-up.Werner Vogels presents the Amazon solution and shows how their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) offerings provide a blueprint for "Web-Scale Computing". Vogels contends that this allows businesses to outsource their "heavy lifting" and implement an elastic business model that can quickly respond to demand.

Vogels introduces customers who are already using these business models. One of these is our very own Doug Kaye, who describes how Gigavox Media is exploiting the potential of Amazon's web services.