Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) just announced Cloud Drive along with Cloud Player.

Introducing Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player for Web, and Amazon Cloud Player for Android

Buy anywhere, play anywhere and keep all your music in one place
Start with 5 GB of free Cloud Drive storage - upgrade to 20 GB free with purchase of any MP3 album

SEATTLE, Mar 29, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.

"We're excited to take this leap forward in the digital experience," said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon. "The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music."

Here is the site for Cloud Drive.

After 5 GB here is the pricing.

The music battle between Apple iTunes and Amazon MP3 Store are turned up a notch.

Here are some technical details on what is behind cloud drive.

A Drive in the Cloud

To build Amazon Cloud Drive the team made use of a number of cloud computing services offered by Amazon Web Services. The scalability, reliability and durability requirements for Cloud Drive are very high which is why they decided to make use of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as the core component of their service. Amazon S3 is used by enterprises of all sizes and is designed to handle scaling extremely well; it stores hundreds of billions of objects and easily performs several hundreds of thousands of storage transaction a second.

Amazon S3 uses advanced techniques to provide very high durability and reliability; for example it is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. Such a high durability level means that if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. Amazon S3 redundantly stores your objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. The service is designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy, for example there may be a concurrent loss of data in two facilities without the customer ever noticing.

Cloud Drive also makes extensive use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help ensure that objects owned by a customer can only be accessed by that customer. IAM is designed to meet the strict security requirements of enterprises and government agencies using cloud services and allows Amazon Cloud Drive to manage access to objects at a very fine grained level.

A key part of the Cloud Drive architecture is a Metadata Service that allows customers to quickly search and organize their digital collections within Cloud Drive. The Cloud Player Web Applications and Cloud Player for Android make extensive use of this Metadata service to ensure a fast and smooth customer experience.

DataCenterKnowledge just posted on expanded data center growth by Amazon in Oregon, speculating on AWS growth, but the big growth is Amazon Cloud Drive & Player which is specifically in Amazon S3.

Amazon’s Cloud Goes Modular in Oregon
March 28th, 2011 : Rich Miller
The data center arm of Amazon.com is building data centers at three sites in Oregon, according to local media, who report that two of the sites are using a modular design. A third site, which has been the focus of on-and-off construction activity for several years, appears to be employing a more traditional design.

With the new projects, Amazon.com joins major cloud builders Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in embracing factory-built components as a strategy to reduce the cost and deployment time for data center capacity. The Oregon construction is part of a larger effort by Amazon to prepare for a significant expansion of its data center capacity to accommodate the growth of its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon has also been acquiring property near Dublin, Ireland to expand the European data center hub for AWS.