Slashdot Mirror
The Biggest Cloud Providers Are Botnets
Julie188 writes "Google is made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwidth, according to cloud service provider Neustar. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps. But these clouds are dwarfed by the likes of the really big cloud services, otherwise known as botnets. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries, with more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth."
And they came up with that number how?
28 terabit/s == 28.000 gigabit/s == 28.000.000 megabit/s
28.000.000 megabit/s / 6.400.000 systems would average out to 4.375 megabit/s AVERAGE bit rate over those 6 1/2 million systems in 230 countries... (oh - and to fully utilize that, it would also require the UPLOAD rate to be in the same ballpark figure; to have more than 4 megabit/s upload speed on average over that many systems in that many countries...?)
18.000.000 cpus in 6.400.000 systems is on AVERAGE 2.812 CPUs per system - so, most of the systems would already have been dual or even quad cores... ...oh - and in order to qualify such numbers, that would have to be the average number of systems online at any given moment; if half of them are switched off (while someone is asleep, away, ...) - the numbers go down.
I would believe, that conficker and similar botnets are huge, but the numbers depend strongly on 'estimates'. Also, if conficker really managed to 'rent out' the computing power, the botnet would likely quickly decrease in size, as more and more people would take their systems to repairs, because they are so slow all of a sudden...)
So, how do they get to those numbers? Apart from, obviously, pulling them out of thin air? ...and apart from the desire, to get the name of the company coming up with the number out on slashdot?
I'm impressed how while academia is all high on grids, billable cpu time, fault tolerant and robust distributed computing, in place live upgrades, all that is already in natural evolutional development out there in the wild. I'm sure that the botnet uptime numbers they get are much higher that any commercially available cloud, while running on household PCs with household broadband connectivity.
I think it's time to embrace the true nature of wild wild web. Where can I rent this botnet legally?
Seeing some troll comments here, I wonder whether they (the botnets) already do - and post to slashdot... ;-)
Rustok was a real piss cock
Who was very rarely stable.
Cutwail, Cutwail was a woozy beggar
Who could dos you under the table.
Bobax aka Kraken could out-consume
Nagle!
And Maazben was a leery swine
Who was just as poorly coded as Bagle!
There's nothing Grum couldn't teach ya
'Bout the razing of the kernel.
Mega-D, itself, was permanently pissed.
Festi-ville, of its own free will,
On half a gig of pipe was particularly ill.
Xarvester, they say, could stick it away--
Half a dozen XP machine every day.
Donbot, Donbot was a bugger for the lot.
Conficker was fond of its spam,
And Gregory King was a drunk on bling.
'I spam, therefore I am.'
Yes, ZeuS, itself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when it's pissed!
-- Apologies in advance to the Pythons
The fact is that most Windows users firstly don't care what runs on their computer, and secondly don't use even a non-negligible fraction their computer's power.
Suggestions have been made, by frustrated sysadmins, for a "destructive" counter-virus, a large-scale attack that cripples botnets by destroying infected computers. That's not only morally wrong but also just impractical - the average computer user just buys a new computer, and all the virus does is destroy property to satisfy lust for vengeance. Value is lost.
A more practical idea may be to re-purpose this vast resource of free computing power and put it to better use than churning out advertisements. A botnet worm could instead hook these computers up to a grid computing project like Folding or SETI, or distributed file transfer, cloud storage, providing uncensored communication to authoritarian countries. The worm could at the same time inoculate computers against more damaging viruses and botnets. The user gets free protection instead of the overpriced crud by McAfee & co; the world gets free computing infrastructure, the internet gets less spam. Everybody gains value.
It would be like a very lenient security tax - for letting their computers pose a risk to the network at large, users donate a share of their computing power/bandwidth for the good of society, at no real cost to themselves.
(And yes, the obvious ethical dilemma here is whether it is morally wrong to manipulate a person's property without their knowledge or consent, even to their own benefit. This suggestion takes a strict utilitarian perspective, which doesn't always lead to the best option.)
Regarding whether it's better to host in the cloud or buy your own environment - I often ask when designing a software solution to process a given business requirement 'Does this need to be repeatable (forever, using different datasets) or is this a one time run?' If they only want the answers to a problem once against a single data set, I can crank out a one-pass solution with about 1/10th the time (and effort, and cost) that it would take me to engineer a long term solution that I can hand over to their business users to use forever using different data sets.
I would take the same stance on something applicable to cloud computing. If you only need the results from a small limited set of runs or you will only run it a very small portion of the time, it makes sense to lease someone else's environment. If you are going to need this solution as part of your day to day business and it runs wide open 24x7 - it's probably more cost effective to procure your own environment.
Need a massive render farm to do a proof of concept showing a four minute preview of Toy Story 4? Cloud computing.
Need a massive render farm to actually generate every CGI frame for every movie Disney or Lucas is going to produce the next four years? Buy your own environment.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer