By 2011, the company had several locations providing S3
and EC2 Web services. It also offered online relational database services using either
MySQL or the Oracle DBMS. Anyone can pay to store data in the DBMS, with charges be-ing levied per hour, per data stored, and per data transferred. The point is that Amazon
handles all of the maintenance and other companies avoid fixed costs. Even government
agencies are adopting the benefits of storing data in these cloud services—including those
run by Amazon. For example, the U.S. Treasury Department moved is public Web sites to
the Amazon cloud. [Pratt 2011].