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Amazon's Cloud May Provision 50,000 VMs a Day

Posted by kdawson on from the golden-lining dept.

Dan Jones writes "It has been estimated that Amazon Web Services is provisioning some 50,000 EC2 server instances per day, or more than 18 million per year. But that may not be entirely accurate. A single Amazon Machine Image (the virtual machine) may be launched multiple times as an EC2 instance, thereby indicating that the true number of individual Amazon servers may be lower, perhaps much lower, than 50,000 per day. So, even if it's out by a factor of 10 that's still 1.8 million VMs per year. Is that sustainable? By way of comparison, In February of this year, Amazon announced S3 contained 40 billion objects. By August, the number was 64 billion objects. This indicates a growth of 4 billion S3 objects per month, giving a daily growth total of about 133 million new S3 objects per day. How big can the cloud get before it starts to rain?"

8 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. tag: Dumbquestion by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How big can the cloud get before it starts to rain?"

    Clouds don't work like that, they let go their rain when they enter a pressure zone where they can no longer hold water.

    If Amazon is centrally dispatching, then they deserve to fail. If not, then there's no reason why getting larger would necessarily cause any particular problem.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Please stop... by broken_chaos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cloud is bad enough. Starting up bullshit analogies with clouds and rain just muddy whatever you're talking about far, far more than is necessary.

    1. Re:Please stop... by moon3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Managers love this kind of terminology, because from their point of view Internet just 'happens' somehow, they do not have a real clue how, but the cloud fits perfectly into this kind of thinking. That is why cloud hosting is so popular, they just order 4GB/100Mbit/s cloud and the hosting company creates one for them. They do not have to worry about setting up DNS, SQLs, multiple servers, domains, SMTPs and get schooled by some lowlife nerdy IT guys, they understand the dumbed down cloud interface well enough themselves, they just interact with the web interface and are happy it is all working for them.. somehow, somewhere, in the cloud.

  3. How is using so many VMs more efficient? by Viol8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've never really understood the fuss around VMs. Sure , they're useful if you want to test run an OS install or run a different OS on top of another. But otherwise whats the point? Instead of having app + OS you end up with app + VM + OS so how exactly is that benefiting anyone other than the power company for the extra electricity used?

    1. Re:How is using so many VMs more efficient? by slim · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When did installing multiple apps on 1 server go out of fashion?

      When it became clear it's a management headache.

      "Hi it's ops. You know your foo server sits on the same box as the bar server? Yeah, well the bar guys have found out they need a kernel with a higher filehandle limit, so we're going to be rebooting that box. You'll need to tell your users about the outage. Oh, and you'd better have QA test the foo server with the new kernel too."

  4. 50k VMs/day is not THAT much... by nweaver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Lets give a 12 hour lifespan, and say 25K VMs at the same time.

    At 5 VMs/physical host (I suspect it is MUCH denser actually), thats only 5K servers. At 50 servers/rack, its 100 racks.

    Or, in translation, not THAT much.

    --
    Test your net with Netalyzr
  5. Re:ok did a manager write this?! by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So to use a car analogy (cough)

    - It's the same reason why people lease cars instead of buying them. It's cheaper in the short term, and easier to come up with $300 for rent than $20,000 for purchase. Plus adding extra cars as new employees join the company is trivially easy.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  6. Re:ok did a manager write this?! by afidel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But it's even better than a car lease, because you can end the lease on the VM with no penalty. If you have a really big batch job that needs to run once a month then you just spin up the VM's for the duration of the batch job paying for your usage and them deprovision them for the rest of the month.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.