An Amazon cloud exec accidentally showed a picture of Google's data center

Last week, Amazon had its gigantic Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, presenting the latest developments in its mammoth cloud computing platform to a crowd of thousands of IT professionals.

Except that during one presentation extolling the virtues of Amazon's super-efficient data centers, Amazon Web Services VP of Infrastructure Jerry Hunter used a picture of one of Google's data centers instead. Whoops.

Google

That picture is actually a part of the search giant's vaunted "Jupiter" network, which supports the entire company from the inside, as pointed out in a Google+ post by Google cloud boss Urs Hölzle.

In a reply to Hölzle's post, Amazon Web Services marketing employee Jim Sherhart, who helped prepare the presentation for re:Invent, took responsibility for the error.

"This was my mistake. Because we have a lot of IP in our datacenters, we don't typically show images of them in presentations," Sherhart says.

It's true. Unlike Google, Amazon doesn't like to share pictures of the guts of its data centers. Sherhart says he searched for a generic data center picture, and accidentally turned up a Google photo. He says it's since been fixed.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.