Few tech companies openly discuss their usage of AWS because that would be like the wizard revealing himself to Dorothy. Would you trust a service that's essentially a few computer science graduates in a rented office with little more than a good idea and ? But that's what a surprising number of tech firms are. Services with tens of millions of users can be corralled by just a handful of guys overseeing an AWS Web control panel.

None of this is a revelation to me. In one way or another, Amazon's been making possible my career recently.

I've written for various publishers but decided to self-publish . To do so, I used , a print-on-demand service owned by Amazon. CreateSpace lets absolutely anybody publish a book and sell it on Amazon.com, as well as into bookstores worldwide. There's no editor employed by Amazon to tut-tut at content. Within sensible guidelines, Amazon doesn't tell the author what they can publish. They can just upload a PDF and everything else happens magically. Authors can simply sit back and (hopefully) wait for the money to roll in, which is a significantly higher percentage than they'd get via royalty deals with publishers.

I decided to give away the . Here again, I couldn't have done it without Amazon. Its Simple Storage Service (S3) offering, as part of AWS, makes it possible for hundreds of people every day to download the 2MB eBook file. This costs me less than a dollar a month in fees. Before S3 came along, it would have been prohibitively expensive to offer the download.

My most recent publishing project has taken advantage of Amazon's to sell . This lets me publish books for . After I'd put the books together and uploaded them, they were available via Amazon.com to buy within days. Again, nobody stood in my way, and there were no hoops to jump through.