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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.
“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"
You are not looking carefully enough.
"In that sense, Microsoft is far, far ahead of the others"
You know what happens with the ones too far, far ahead of others? In the future, people rise statues honoring them, but they usually die poor and/or too young.
It's quite funny you talk about Microsoft since, back in the day, it was Novell the one far, far ahead of Microsoft on PC-based client/server deployments. And know what? Microsoft not only didn't give a damn but they mocked Novell as too complex. And they were right: most people wasn't ready for Novell forests and inherited/nested permissions and Windows for Workgroups was everything they could cope with. Then they grew up to "classic" domains, still tad simpler than Novell while still being "good enough" for their customer base (in fact, being not only "good enough" but "top notch" since for most of them it was all they knew as in practical terms it was Microsoft itself the one "educating" them).
Eventually, Novell died and, who could think about it!? the very next day Microsoft came up with their new and shinny Active Domains that were basically what Novell had been doing since ten years before: now, somehow, that wasn't "too complex" anymore but the only true way.
I'd say Amazon is exactly on the same track today: on one hand, most people, as you say, is not ready yet for higher abstraction levels like PaaS, IaaS is good enough and strongly growing. On the other hand, PaaS market is far from mature enough: writing code against any public API today is guaranteed to have it rewritten even before the provider gets to declare it non-beta.
And there's even more: it's said that in the gold rush, the only ones consistently making money where the shovel shops, not the miners: nowadays, the "hardware store" is Amazon and it is the people building on top of AWS the ones taking the real risks of doing business. And Amazon is not just seeing the time going by: few years back they offered pretty simple virtual machines; now they offer quite a complex landscape with databases, routing, DNS, load balancing, tiered persistent storage... They are the Microsoft of today mocking on the ones too far, far ahead while, at the same time, cultivating their own customer base to make them ready for their future products and services.
"As Sunday's outage demonstrates, the Amazon Web Services cloud is critical to many of its more than 1 million customers"
I thought the outage demonstrated the relative unreliability of Amazon cloud Services. What are the legally binding terms of services that AWS provide in relation to uptime.
I like your comment, it is quite funny, but to address the question:
The packets are larger (more bits) so take longer to transmit, and more memory to store. Also, ASICs are built for IPv4, they don't work for IPv6, so much of IPv6 traffic is done in CPU rather than ASICs which is less efficient in power usage.
I doubt the power difference is terribly high, but at an Amazon level, it would likely be noticeable.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?