Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...
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