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Amazon's Cloud Now 1% of Internet Traffic

Posted by Unknown on from the cloud-internet-convergence dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Wired story claims Amazon's cloud now hosts enough companies and traffic to generate 1% of all Internet traffic (and visits from 1/3 of daily Internet users). An amazing number if true. And a little scary for one company to host this much cloud infrastructure."

49 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Akamai was there years ago by ProfessionalTech · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And a little scary for one company to host this much cloud infrastructure.

    Right. Akamai delivers around 20% of internet's traffic, is basically cloud content provider and has been so since the 90's. There's still long way for Amazon to go.

    1. Re:Akamai was there years ago by CastrTroy · · Score: 2

      Except that Akamai mostly deals with static content. Distribution of images, video and static pages. While Amazon allows you to host web applications on their platform. Plus you can rent out computing time for non-internet related purposes. Quite different services as far as I'm concerned.

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    2. Re:Akamai was there years ago by ProfessionalTech · · Score: 4, Informative

      And delivering static content (images, videos, software executables and patches and so on) is what makes most of the traffic on Amazon's network, so thinking about non-internet related purposes on a story about how much traffic Amazon has is a moot point. Besides, Akamai's CDN and the availability of their network in different parts of the world is much more impressive than Amazon's.

    3. Re:Akamai was there years ago by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      Akamai is a cloud content provider, much the same as my squid proxy server is a cloud content provider.

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    4. Re:Akamai was there years ago by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Right. Akamai delivers around 20% of internet's traffic, is basically cloud content provider and has been so since the 90's.

      LOL, is "multiple regional cache servers" now "the cloud"?

      I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, I've just never seen it distilled quite down to its essence like that.

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    5. Re:Akamai was there years ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Right. Akamai delivers around 20% of internet's traffic, is basically cloud content provider and has been so since the 90's.

      LOL, is "multiple regional cache servers" now "the cloud"?

      I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, I've just never seen it distilled quite down to its essence like that.

      It is the cloud (which is an incredibly over-used term).

      Just because it isn't providing actual off-load of compute power in terms of processes running "in the cloud" versus at an origin doesn't mean it isn't the cloud. Akamai provides storage and routing logic (through several means) outside of a single customer - it certainly is "the cloud".

    6. Re:Akamai was there years ago by drkstr1 · · Score: 1
      You left off the second definition on that page.

      2) (US) An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically, and such discussion may be useful for addressing similar issues in the future, the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.

      I have only ever heard it used in this form...

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  2. LOL, Raise their taxes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    After all, they ARE the 1%

  3. 1% is "a little scary"? by gstrickler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's scary is that the author thinks 1% is scary. Let's talk again if they hit 10%.

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    1. Re:1% is "a little scary"? by alen · · Score: 2

      any time someone dares to serve more of the internet than google its scary

    2. Re:1% is "a little scary"? by hemo_jr · · Score: 2

      It may be large enough to make the MPAA notice. And since the only reason that kind of traffic is generated is copyrighted material. And all copyrighted material on the Internet must have a significant component owned by the MPAA,

      So Jeff Bezos should be getting smeared as a pirate soon. And his local swat team should be visiting him, along with the prerequisite FBI, ICE and Homeland Security thugs.

      So, ya, it could be a bit scary.

    3. Re:1% is "a little scary"? by justforgetme · · Score: 1

      Well, Google most definitely is scary, so I would go with Yes!

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    4. Re:1% is "a little scary"? by allo · · Score: 1

      > serve more of the internet than google
      implies google serves less than 50% of the internet ......

  4. Re:Get ready for it by halfEvilTech · · Score: 2

    This already happens due to most people not disabling scripts on most sites. My wife has an amazon account and often gets offer emails on products availible related to things she has been looking at or searching for.

    so wouldn't be anything new.

  5. Does the Kindle use the cloud? by cpu6502 · · Score: 1

    When I use its "experimental" browser to access the web, is it using the Amazon cloud or going direct to the net? It is unclear.

    (Note: I'm talking about the regular kindle, not the Kindle fire with its Silk browser.)

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    1. Re:Does the Kindle use the cloud? by alen · · Score: 2

      the web lives on amazon's cloud. a lot of websites are stored on amazon's cloud to be closer to customers.

      the idea that you visit a site by going to someone's server is quite quaint and outdated

    2. Re:Does the Kindle use the cloud? by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      according to things I've read, it's "enhanced" by the "Amazon Cloud". I'm willing to bet it's proxied, just to make sure you're not using the AT&T 3G for anything too personal.

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    3. Re:Does the Kindle use the cloud? by cpu6502 · · Score: 1

      >>>according to things I've read, it's "enhanced" by the "Amazon Cloud".

      That's true for Amazon Silk on the Fire tablet. It operates similar to Opera Turbo where the browser fetches pages from the Opera server and then downloads a compressed images/text/HTML.

      But my older Kindle doesn't come with Silk. Its browser is called "experimental" and operates at 3G speeds (about the same as my home DSL ~700 kbit/s).

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    4. Re:Does the Kindle use the cloud? by will_die · · Score: 1

      The Kindle Fire does, other don't.
      However all digital books and music, IIRC, that you purchase from amazon are on the "cloud"

    5. Re:Does the Kindle use the cloud? by cpu6502 · · Score: 1

      So far I've not bought anything for my kindle... I just copy-over plain text books.
      Amazon must be annoyed.
      Heh heh. :-)

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  6. not true by twistedcubic · · Score: 1

    It would be scary if it were true. But it ain't true. Nevertheless, GREAT topic for discussion!

  7. Re:Get ready for it by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Dear Amazon.com customer:

    Fred, we noticed from your surfing history that you recently viewed

    More likely:

    "Dear Amazon.com customer:
    Bob, we noticed from your surfing history that you recently viewed porn.

    You may also be interested in: more porn.

    Sincerely, Jeff B. and Amazon.com"

    The advantage of that message is that you don't even really need to check the user's history.

  8. Akamai doesn't generate traffic by CaptainNerdCave · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Akamai is like a company that handles the pedestrian and motor traffic, they don't actually generate anything. Their business model is designed around traffic management and _content_delivery_.

    Amazon, Google, et al are generating the traffic.

    1. Re:Akamai doesn't generate traffic by justforgetme · · Score: 1

      The diff between AWS (amazon's web services) and Akamai is that AWS provides processing substrates integrated with CDN functionality.
      Akamai mostly does CDN. This means that AWS has access both to the bits and the "metadata" (DBs, mappers, reducers, binaries) its clients manage and Akamai only accesses the generated bits.
      AWS is a much more vertical integration than Akamai, comparable - with a bit of imagination - to Apple vs Microsoft.

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  9. Re:Well.. by Thanshin · · Score: 1

    Still less than any major porn site...

    Any major porn site moves 1% of internet's traffic?

    How many major porn sites are there? I hope it's less than 99, otherwise I've spent years in slashdot without figuring how to activate the porn opt-in.

  10. Bad Bots by Bill+Dimm · · Score: 2

    Is it just my imagination, or is there a huge amount of traffic from AWS coming from bots that don't respect robots.txt?

    1. Re:Bad Bots by tool462 · · Score: 2

      I was gonna say...

      Is this Cloud to Cloud, or Cloud to ground traffic?

  11. Re:Get ready for it by tomhath · · Score: 1

    I suspect it's more due to third-party tracking cookies. The Collusion add-on for Firefox was mentioned on Slashdot recently. It shows very clearly how the various sites you visit are connected.

  12. Re:So when they break everything goes faster? by christianT · · Score: 1

    Not really since it is only 1%

  13. I for one., by wbr1 · · Score: 1

    ...welcome our new overlord, Mr. Bezos.

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  14. Re:Well.. by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

    You'd seriously be surprised how much the porn industry has died down on the net, with the economy crunch.

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  15. Fixed that... by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "And a little scary for one company (other than Google or Apple) to host this much cloud infrastructure."
     
    There, fixed that for you.

  16. Can't be true by necro81 · · Score: 1

    1% is far, far, too low a number. Surely the editors left out a zero or two. After all, according to the all-wise prognosticators at Wired, Amazon owns the internet.

  17. Netflix? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But Netflix is said to use 32% of bandwidth (http://on.msnbc.com/HS3Or5), and Netflix is hosted by AWS, isn't it

    1. Re:Netflix? by hobarrera · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I seriously doubt this: Netflix isn't available in most countries outside USA, an I'm pretty sure Asia adds up far more traffic than USA.

    2. Re:Netflix? by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

      netflix is hosted by level 3 inside the ISP's networks

      they use amazon for the authentication part

    3. Re:Netflix? by FlashBIOS · · Score: 2

      Really? Are you sure?

      Netflix used to serve movies using IPv6 according to our college's traffic logs (if fact, they were about the only IPv6 traffic out there at the time). They one day it stopped. Around that time, news sites starting reporting that Netflix now streams from Amazon. Amazon doesn't support IPv6.

  18. "Server" Costs by Bigbutt · · Score: 3, Informative

    I spec'd out a cloud server a few months ago to replace my physical server and the yearly cost of the Amazon cloud server that matched my physical box was just about double (it cost more to get a 64bit system vs a 32bit system).

    [John]

    --
    Shit better not happen!
    1. Re:"Server" Costs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes. Using a Cloud for 1:1 replacement of a physical hardware is silly. The point is to use the Cloud to flexibly manage your instances I.e. if you're hosting a website, you can spin up more instances during your busy hours, and shut them down again when it's quite: unlike physical hardware, which would sit idle during the quite periods.

    2. Re:"Server" Costs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They include some redundancy, the internet connection, power, and AC. A single server probably won't match their uptime either unless you have it at a co-lo facility.

  19. Re:Well.. by PerfectionLost · · Score: 1

    Don't forget that porn sites use CDNs and clouds--some of them may use the amazon cloud as well...

  20. LOTC by dvazquez · · Score: 1

    One cloud to rule them all...

  21. Accelerated Down Time by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

    Well, then. If 2011 is any indication, then Amazon's greater share of Net traffic should INCREASE the average amount of downtime for webservers.

    All centralization of the internet equals a decrease in quality and reliability.

    1. Re:Accelerated Down Time by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      "you're claiming that it'd be better for businesses to run physical servers in their office than run virtual servers in a cloud of ~450k machines spread across god-knows-how-many dedicated datacenters?"

      Yep. The numbers work out that way.

      Keep in mind that no matter how many datacenters and how many machines, Amazon was DOWN for quite a long time in 2011. (And, although this is only an single anecdote: all the vaunted redundancy of AWS did not save the site of one of my customers when an Amazon server suffered a hardware failure a few months ago. Yes, there were local backups, but Amazon was completely useless and unhelpful in the situation and newer data was lost from the database.)

      For that matter, Microsoft's cloud services also went down in 2011, and so did Google. All of the major services except perhaps Akamai, I believe.

      While your examples are internally distributed, in the broader view of the internet they still represent concentrated-point-of-failure bottlenecks.

      On the other hand, our cheaper company and personal servers were down less often, and never for more than a few hours.

      I am all for cloud computing, for certain uses. And I will start doing it... when the reliability numbers actually show that it is justified.

  22. Want scary numbers? by gmuslera · · Score: 1

    What about how much percent of all internet trafic goes thru companies based on a single country where by law (present or in a near future) must handle in a silver plate all their customer/visitors data to the government, and block whatever the government says, and so on.

  23. Instagram by tmarthal · · Score: 1

    I believe that Instagram is 100% hosted on AWS EC2 instances and S3. We'll see if they move to Facebook's data centers.

    The $1B valuation of that company would not have been possible without using Amazon as their provider. Amazon is definitely doing something right.

  24. At what % by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    When does the %s get high enough to no longer qualify as 'cloud' and instead multiple single points of failure services.

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  25. Re:Well.. by justforgetme · · Score: 1

    Don't forget that porn sites use CDNs and clouds--some of them may use the amazon cloud as well...

    Amazon Elastic Porn & Stalk?

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  26. Does Amazon ban porn? by allo · · Score: 1

    Or why is it such a small number?