Why attackers can’t take down Amazon.com

Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) has spent years creating and refining an “elastic” infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites. Its customers include the New York Times, Second Life, Etsy, Playfish, the Indianapolis 500 and the Washington Post.