Earth's biggest selection

Although it boasts having "Earth's biggest selection," Amazon.com's reach has stretched to Mars.

Better known for being an e-commerce giant, Amazon has become a major player in cloud computing, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the company's Amazon Web Services to capture and store images and metadata collected from the Mars Exploration Rover and Mars Science Laboratory missions.

With so much large-scale data processing to be done, JPL is leading the way in the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government, said Khawaja Shams, manager for data services at La Canada Flintridge-based JPL.

"At this point, JPL's data centers are filled to capacity, so we're looking for ways to cost effectively expand the computational horsepower that we have at our disposal," he said. "Cloud computing is giving us that opportunity."

Using AWS's cloud to operate the mars.jpl.nasa.govwebsite, Shams noted, enables JPL to get images, videos and developments to the public quickly