Amazon Hosts Public Data Sets

SEATTLE -- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today launched Public Data Sets on AWS,” providing access to a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various U.S. Census databases from the U.S. Census Bureau, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl. More data sets will be available soon, including a wide range of economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and additional scientific data sets.

Previously, large data sets such as the Human Genome and U.S. Census data required many hours to locate, download and customize. Now, anyone can access these large data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. By growing the number of people with access to important and useful data, and making it easy to compute on that data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to fuel innovation and further accelerate the pace of new discoveries.

“For over five years AWS has been working to lower the barriers to entry, level the playing field, and make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. “Public Data Sets on AWS is the latest of these efforts, and we can’t wait to see the discoveries and innovations that could stem from this ecosystem.”

Amazon Web Services LLC