Bangalore: “Amazon Web Services 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.”

Amazon Web Services or AWS has hit $650 million in revenue, according to Citigroup in 2010 and it took eight years for them to get there. Experts predict that AWS will cross $3.8 billion in 2013 revenue, up from $2.1 billion in 2012 (estimated), valuing the AWS business at $19 billion, a position that the cloud computing giant will be comfortable in.

“Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world. With data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, and Australia,” Amazon Web Services is the front runner in this domain.

AWS’s business thrives in small and medium business enterprises and startups due to its low cost and easy accessibility but in 2013, AWS will be targeting at the bigger customers with new product launches like Redshift –“a petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud” nonetheless  one forgets that there are risks involved in putting all your faith in one entity.

On 15^th of October 2012 Amazon Web Services outage caused by memory leak and failure in monitoring systems took out most of the major services provided by AWS. Later on the company admitted through a statement that an AWS developer accidentally removed part of the software which ensured data loads properly being distributed across the computers in a computer center in Virginia. New activity on the site was slowed or failed altogether and the service was not fully restored for almost 12 hours.

A simple human error caused the failure of the service altogether. Now, that AWS plans to expand to greater avenues can it guarantee that such errors in judgment will not happen again? AWS will have to weigh it’s scales and measure its reach before it tries to embark on such an exigent endeavor.