Microsoft’s Windows Azure has come out on top in a year’s worth of Cloud speed tests, beating Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Rackspace and 20 others.

One of to features of Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire tablet drawing attention is its WebKit-based 'Silk' Web browser. What makes Silk different from most browsers is its 'split browser' approach: Putting together complicated Web pages in Amazon's Cloud infrastructure before downloading the end result to the browser.

Despite Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) services in the US-EAST-1 Web services centre having experienced another outage, as well as issues with the Amazon Relational Database Service in Virginia, and left social networking sites such as FourSquare out of action, Australian businesses appear to be largely unaffected.

Outages to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offerings over the weekend have received plenty of global coverage, but they left at least one Australian business frustrated.

Amazon Web Services has been going through a much publicised outage, which has lasted by all appearances more than 12 hours. A range of services including Hootsuite, Reddit, Heroku, Foursquare, Quora and others have all faced major disruptions.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.

Got unpredictable demand for your company's Web-based service? Perhaps Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is the answer. Here's how one start-up cashed in on Amazon EC2.