Designing and optimizing an IT environment that responds to demand in real time is one of the biggest challenges facing cloud users given the spikes and troughs in typical requirements. At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas we met with users from a range of companies and listened to their concerns about usage and identified five main takeaways.

The single biggest news coming from Amazon Web Service's first user conference recently was the launch of the company's newest service, Redshift, a Cloud-based data warehouse tool. And it prompts the question: Is the Cloud the right place for data warehousing?

Amazon says its market-leading cloud platform housed more than 200 custom-built applications for President Obama's re-election campaign, resulting in a temporary IT deployment that rivals the scope and complexity of IT services at the largest enterprises.

An unexpected bug cropped up after new hardware was installed in one of Amazon Web Service's Northern Virginia data centers, which caused the more than 12-hour outage last week that brought down popular sites such as Reddit, Imgur, AirBNB and Salesforce.com's Heroku platform, according to a postmortem issued by Amazon.

Amazon Web Services, fresh off an outage that brought down big-name sites such as Reddit and Imgur, today announced an 18 per cent price reduction for its virtual machines

Amazon Web Services has almost fully recovered from a more than 12-hour event that appears to have started by only impacting a small number of customers but quickly snowballed into a larger issue that took down major sites including Reddit, Imgur and others yesterday.

While AT&T's attempts to acquire T-Mobile are stuck in limbo, rival Verizon has been quietly gobbling up spectrum from cable companies like Cox Communications, which today sold Verizon $315 million in licenses for 20MHz of its Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum.