Amazon Web Services Goes to School with New Programs for Educators, Researchers, and Students

From Teaching Grants and Free AWS Credits for Selected Research Projects to
Tutorials for Students, AWS in Education Connects the Creativity of the Academic
Community with the Flexibility of the AWS Cloud
SEATTLE--(Business Wire)--
Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN),
today announced AWS in Education, a set of programs that enable the academic
community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching
and research. With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and
students worldwide can obtain free usage credits to tap into the on-demand
infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to teach advanced courses, tackle research
endeavors and explore new projects - tasks that previously would have required
expensive investments in infrastructure. AWS in Education also provides
self-directed learning resources on cloud computing for students. To sign up and
begin using Amazon Web Services, and to apply for grants for usage credits,
visit: http://aws.amazon.com/education

"The flexibility and instant scalability of the AWS cloud have made it a popular
environment for teaching courses and tackling research projects in basic
programming, application development, distributed computing, and more," said
Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for
Amazon Web Services. "Whether giving students experience in cloud computing or
assisting in sophisticated research, AWS in Education makes it easy to get
going."

AWS for Educators

To assist educators in bringing the cloud to the classroom, AWS is offering
grants of $100 per student for free usage of AWS infrastructure services in
eligible courses at accredited universities. Faculty can apply for these grants
via a simple online form and provide their students with hands-on access to the
same infrastructure services used by software developers and IT staffs around
the world.

"In Fall 2008, we moved Harvard's 300-student introductory Computer Science
course into the cloud via Amazon EC2," said David J. Malan, Lecturer on Computer
Science, Harvard University. "Our goals were both technical and pedagogical. As
Computer Scientists, we wanted full control over our course's infrastructure so
that we could install software at will and respond to problems at any hour. As
teachers, we wanted easier access to our students' work as well as the ability
to grow and shrink our infrastructure as problem sets' computational
requirements demanded. Moreover, because of AWS we were able to integrate into
the course's own syllabus discussion of scalability, virtualization, multi-core
processing, and cloud computing itself. What better way to teach topics like
those than to have students actually experience them."

"Using AWS for our Web 2.0 Application Development courses has been a phenomenal
resource," said Armando Fox, Adjunct Associate Professor, University of
California, Berkeley. "Administration was so easy that students were able to get
their projects deployed quickly, and venture capitalists attending the final
project demos were impressed at the level of polish and creativity that a small
student team could produce in just a few weeks."

AWS for Academic Researchers

Increasing numbers of academic researchers are leveraging Amazon Web Services to
accelerate research and advance study in a variety of fields. Beginning
immediately, AWS will selectively award grants for AWS service credits to make
it even easier for higher learning institutions to conduct important research.
Each quarter, AWS will evaluate proposals and award grants to researchers at
accredited universities based on factors such as the uniqueness and usefulness
of the project, use of AWS within the project, and potential to attain matching
funds from other organizations interested in the project.

"The Malaria Atlas Project is an ambitious collaboration between international
malaria scientists with one specific aim: to make detailed global maps of
malaria to help drive the fight against the disease," said Dr. Pete Gething,
Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. "Current knowledge is
surprisingly patchy and this hampers efforts to target funds and resources to
the people that need them most. Our research grant from Amazon Web Services
means we now have access to the kind of serious parallel processing that we need
to implement our work in feasible timescales and the storage to deal with the
massive output of that work."

AWS for Students

For students and student organizations, AWS is a valuable platform for
completing coursework, supporting individual projects, or for exploring the
reliability, scalability, and cost effectiveness of an in-the-cloud technology
infrastructure. Amazon has made a number of tutorials available online to help
students begin exploring cloud computing concepts in a self-directed manner.
These tutorials include advanced computing topics such as asynchronous
messaging, consensus algorithms, priority queues, and more. In addition, Amazon
will accept proposals from individual students or student groups at accredited
universities and will award AWS free usage grants for worthy individual or group
projects.

"The grant we have received from the AWS in Education program will dramatically
increase the reach of my student group's collaboration with the National
Federation of the Blind (NFB) to develop distributed assistive computer vision
technology for the visually impaired," said Serge Belongie, Associate Professor
at the University of California in San Diego.

"AWS is a great fit for 3 Day Startup, an event where 40 student entrepreneurs
take a web startup from the drawing board to a launched prototype in 60 intense
hours. With Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 on our side, we can go live in minutes
without worrying about configuration, reliability, and most importantly,
scalability," said Thomas Finsterbusch, PhD candidate at the University of Texas
in Austin.

Educators, academic researchers and students worldwide can apply for grants by
filling out the online application at http://aws.amazon.com/education

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened
on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection.
Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where
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Amazon Web Services provides Amazon`s developer customers with access to
in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology
platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business.
Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon
SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments
Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

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As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com,
Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

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new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating
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financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and
subsequent filings.

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