Web giants lure developers | CNET News.com: "Competition is forming among large Web services providers--Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, eBay, and established tool providers--to attract developers to create Web applications that run on their respective platforms.
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online retail giant, last week started a beta program for a service that lets developers tap into the processing power at Amazon's data centers.

Called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it works with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and other services, such as messaging, search and e-commerce. Each is offered through application programming interfaces (APIs)--a set of instructions for accessing services programmatically.
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As network pipes become more reliable, a large amount of computing becomes available remotely. The process drives standardization of interfaces between different system elements. see also Virtualization.

tags: evolution distribution tool infrastructure interface