Amazon Web Services: The gold standard

Amazon is the standard bearer in the public IaaS space, as its paid-by-the-VM Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is both the market share and mindshare leader by a fairly big gap. It's got a huge portfolio of services that run atop its Xen-based virtualized infrastructure and Amazon keeps adding to those offerings while it lowers its prices. The company has built a thriving ecosystem of partners around its public cloud, has clamored to get all the necessary security and compliance certifications and offers world-wide data center coverage.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business.

AWS enables you to eliminate the need for costly hardware and the administrative pain that goes along with it. AWS can reduce costs and improve cash flow, whether you are starting out or operating on a large scale.