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Inside Amazon's Cloud Computing Infrastructure
1sockchuck writes: As Sunday's outage demonstrates, the Amazon Web Services cloud is critical to many of its more than 1 million customers. Data Center Frontier looks at Amazon's cloud infrastructure, and how it builds its data centers. The company's global network includes at least 30 data centers, each typically housing 50,000 to 80,000 servers. "We really like to keep the size to less than 100,000 servers per data center," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Like Google and Facebook, Amazon also builds its own custom server, storage and networking hardware, working with Intel to produce processors that can run at higher clockrates than off-the-shelf gear.
“Every day, Amazon enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a $7 billion annual revenue enterprise,” said James Hamilton, Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, who described the AWS infrastructure at the Re:Invent conference last fall. “There’s a lot of scale. That volume allows us to reinvest deeply into the platform and keep innovating.”
Did they use AWS for translation on this paragraph? How do you have "a lot of scale"? One can scale up or down, but is this like a computer hokey pokey? Scale is a verb!
Really, I skimmed this one pretty lightly. It looks like a marketing article, not a technical article. Buzz words a plenty, so I'm guessing your question is answered by "marketing"..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's the fact that they only focus on infrastructure. IaaS is their bread and butter and it's what keeps them running and going with companies that don't know anything better than servers and storage, to migrate their workloads (the peaks and valleys kind) into the cloud to save money and be agile.
The next generation is a step beyond that, and it's what Microsoft, SalesForce and Google are building for -- PaaS. The idea that you manage fleets of servers is an archaic one, and the next generation will be writing against an API that manages all of that for you. Azure's Service Fabric, Google's AppEngine, SalesForce's Heroku -- those are the future of cloud computing. It's also a future that AWS doesn't have represented at all.
I am a fan of AWS technologies in their current state and the problem they solve for. But it's a problem that takes EXISTING methodologies and infrastructure and merely replaces them. It does not help prepare for the next generation of developers who grow up with the idea that this is all a commodity and they just want their code to work and execute, and have a smart engine behind it figure out all the needs for their app (be it data, network, power, cooling, memory, etc).
In that sense, Microsoft is far, far ahead of the others and as developers start to change their tune in their practices, we'll see that uptick for Azure happen. In the meanwhile, AWS is a decent place to put your existing servers and storage type of needs.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.