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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.
working with Intel to produce processors that can run at higher clockrates than off-the-shelf gear.
What does this mean? They have custom chips? Custom mods at the chip fab level? Or are they taking advantage of designed-in features that are locked out for normal chip users? Are they simply over-clocking? Or are there features that can be unlocked with money?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's a matter of risk vs reward. Yes, I might be locked into a platform but at the level I develop, MS and other enterprise cloud vendors can't just arbitrarily raise the price. There are enterprise agreements that have liabilities, timelines, penalties and a lot more in order to ensure that there aren't runaway costs. I know, because I've negotiated them with both AWS and Microsoft. Funny thing is, AWS does not agree to terms for large organizations that are any different for a startup, and that's great for small startups as well as AWS to keep their legal costs down (and those get expensive), but for large enterprises with a lot to risk it's not appealing to do business with them on that front because of the fear of arbitrary price raises for any platform type services they provide.
They are getting better since Azure is growing at a faster rate than AWS and they are keenly aware of competition, but I don't think that AWS will provide the flexibility an enterprise needs in terms of the legal and compliance aspect. Thus far since they are relegated to IaaS for the most part, it's a non-issue because competition exists to combat them on price, but as PaaS comes along as well as lock-in... it is much less appetizing.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.