Article $2$: The cheap, convenient cloud $($Apr $2015,$ The Economist$)$

If there were a prize for corporate secrecy$,$ Amazon would have an excellent chance of winning.

Interviewing its executives can be like pulling teeth. Even trivial details are not revealed, such as the

approximate location of the office of Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive, in the company$$s

headquarters in Seattle. Unsurprisingly, then, its quarterly earnings calls are mostly a dull affair. But

financial analysts and many in the information$-$technology $($IT$)$ industry will pay close attention when the

e$-$commerce giant releases results for this year$$s first three months, on April $23$rd$.$ Nearly a decade after it

launched Amazon Web Services $($AWS$),$ the company will enlighten its shareholders about the size,

growth and profitability of its cloud$-$computing business.

The disclosure is meant to reassure investors: they are getting worried about Amazon$$s chronic lack of

profits and the amount of money it is spending$$last year the company as a whole invested nearly $$9$

billion. But the announcement will also signal that cloud$-$computing $($in which data are stored and

crunched on remote servers$)$ has come of age: AWS$$s revenues are thought to have reached $$5$ billion in

$2014$ and to be growing at more than $50\%$ annually. Analysts have already assigned AWS a valuation of

$$44$ billion$$putting it in the same league as incumbent computer$-$makers such as Hewlett$-$Packard, which

has a market capitalisation of $$60$ billion. Although AWS is much larger than the cloud business of rivals

such as Microsoft and Google, they are also growing quickly $($see chart$).$

As cloud providers rush to build new data centres, and battle for market share