Fresh off the release of Amazon.com’s new content delivery network CloudFront, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels talked up the company’s web services to a packed auditorium at the University of Washington. Casually clad in a black T-shirt and jeans, the voluble Vogels told students and faculty about the history of Amazon’s cloud computing efforts, and let drop a few interesting statistics.

Vogels said 440,000 developers are now using Amazon Web Services, which include the S3 storage service and EC2 computing service. There were 29 billion objects in S3 as of October 2008, he said.
Vogels said Amazon’s web services, which let businesses access server capacity and computing power online on a pay-as-you-go basis, make even more sense in these tight economic times.

Source: http://www.techflash.com/venture/Amazon_CTO_promotes_web_services_in_talk_at_UW34701339.html