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Amazon's Cloud May Provision 50,000 VMs a Day
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?"
Sorry , that makes no sense. By definition you could do it on the same hardware without a VM unless your VM somehow magics processing power out of the ether.
I thinl you're missing my point - why have multiple OSes if they're all the same type of OS and the apps could all happily run on the same OS instance? As for deployment - have you never heard of a tarball? OS dies - take app tarball to new server , untar. Hows that different to copying a VM machine file over?
So use 1 server and have 10 client logins on it FFS.
"The only alternative is to install every application onto every server you have, and load balance everything - but that requires that every app is compatible with every other app, and that every app can operate as a cluster."
When did installing multiple apps on 1 server go out of fashion? I realise Windows can't handle many apps on the same box before things go awry but Unix has no issue with it, plus it can load balance between the CPUs , keep all the apps seperate in chrooted jails if necessary and if the server goes down you restore to another box using a tarball or similar.
A VM is just an app. It will have as many OS dependencies as any other app so you will still have OS upgrade issues especially if you upgrade the VM version as time goes by too.