That's not how AWS works at all. Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here: http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-

That's not how AWS works at all. Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here: http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-business http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo... And the history is well presented here: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/am... The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.