Limelight Networks

Amazon and Rackspace appear ready to duke it out in the cloud-services space.

Amazon Web Services has rolled out Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that extends on-demand pay-as-you-go pricing. Web services customers now can make a one-time payment to reserve capacity and reduce hourly usage charges.

On the other side of the ring, Rackspace took its Cloud Files out of beta. Cloud Files provides storage and fast content delivery through Limelight Networks. Prices start at 22 cents a gigabyte.

Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It's another step toward cloud computing, and it will be available later this year.

Amazon is no stranger to the cloud. The retailing behemoth launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. EC2 is a Web service that hosts business software applications. Then Red Hat tapped into the cloud last November with a beta version of its Enterprise Linux operating system on EC2. Now Amazon is expanding the cloud.

Hoping to continue building momentum for its Silverlight technology, Microsoft announced Monday that major content providers are coming aboard and it unveiled a new digital-rights management (DRM) system.

The announcement, at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, said Silverlight technology will be used by Madison Square Garden Interactive, Tencent, Abertis Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SCSi, MNet, and Yahoo Japan.

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