Recovery.gov Moves to Amazon Cloud.  The move marks a milestone for the Obama administration’s cloud computing initiative.  The recovery board expects to save about $750,000 over the next two years — $334,000 this year and $420,000 in 2011 — by running Recovery.gov on EC2. This would represents about 10% of the total $7.5 million that they have spent overall. “Significantly” more savings are expected over the long term, according to the recovery board.

“Building on AWS enables Recovery.gov to reap the benefits of the cloud — including the ability to add or shed resources as needed, paying only for resources used and freeing up scarce engineering resources from running technology infrastructure — without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security,” Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, said in a statement.

“As the world’s largest consumer of information technology and as stewards of taxpayer dollars, the federal government has a duty to be a leader in pioneering the use of new technologies that are more efficient and economical,” Kundra said in a blog post aimed squarely at federal agencies. “By using cloud services, the federal government will gain access to powerful technology resources faster and at lower costs. This frees us to focus on mission-critical tasks instead of purchasing, configuring, and maintaining redundant infrastructure.”

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