[tkahn6]

Amazon gave a tech talk at my school.

EC2 sprang from the problem that Amazon had to buy a bunch of servers to handle the load around the holidays and these servers went underutilized during the rest of the year. So they decided to lease those resources.

When asked about what happens to EC2 during the holidays, the engineer basically replied that Amazon has priority.

[whakojacko]

According to Werner Vogels' (Amazon's CTO) Quora answer, the excess capacity story is a myth. http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo...

[tkahn6]

Well then, that's odd. Thanks for clearing that up.