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

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @12:08AM 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?"

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Please stop... by broken_chaos · 2009-09-30 00:28 · 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 · 2009-09-30 01:42 · 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.