For instance, if you want to use Amazon’s S3 storage service, all you need to do is sign up for a free account and provide a credit card. After a few lines of code to set up your own storage area (called provisioning), you can start storing and retrieving data. You then pay only for what you use, which means there is no time-consuming vendor-selection process and no cost negotiation (the list prices of many corporate software licenses were just the starting point in a negotiation). And you don’t have to secure computers and a data center to run your new database. The cloud provider, in this
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