We have been tracking Amazon for years, but as a reference point consider that in November 2006 BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the title "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet" where the concept of cloud computing as a business model disruptor was catapulted into the mainstream. Since then the risky bet has paid off for Amazon and has helped transform the business ecosystem in ways few could have predicted.

Amazon considers cloud computing to be the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Others may use different definitions but Amazon is the 500lb gorilla so for this post at least we will say we agree!

For an August 2016 update on how things are going see the video at this link and below:

The power of the AWS cloud is now driving continuous advancements in Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

In Artificial Intelligence, one fantastic real-world capability is the AI enabled Amazon Echo, which is really the closest thing you can get to a Star Trek computer.

In IoT, Amazon is providing a means to control and configure IoT devices with easy to use graphical interfaces. They call this feature Amazon IoT. This can be used to control large scale IoT deployments or smaller scale home capabilities (for example, you can buy a home IoT experiment kit from Amazon called the Intel Edison and control that by Amazon IoT, a great way to learn).

For more on Amazon's capabilities in Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and IoT see: https://aws.amazon.com/