
The Scale of AWS and What It Means for the Future of the Cloud - StylifyYourBlog
http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/1/12/the-stunning-scale-of-aws-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-o.html
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wstrange
I sincerely hope there are a few top cloud providers fighting for market
share. An AWS monopoly is not a good thing.

Google has awesome data center technology, and my guess is they have at least
as many servers as AWS (even if most of those servers are for internal use).
If they are willing to invest for the long term, they can be a credible
player.

Microsoft appears to be deeply committed to Azure. As in - we can not lose, we
will spend whatever it takes to make this fly. They will also leverage their
somewhat captive enterprise customers with Azure / AD integration.

Not clear to me how the rest of the pack will fare.

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pnathan
I've been quite impressed by AWS uptime. I've been looking at Azure - I am
cautiously bullish. I'd like to take their services out for a genuine ride,
but don't have the time to really invest deeply into exercising them.

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marktolson
They give you $150 credit each month for 3 years upon signing up with bizspark
with nothing to pay up front. Surely that justifies taking the time to check
it out if you're already curious.

~~~
cddotdotslash
$150/month can't even come close to paying me back for the downtime
experienced using Azure. Plus their online console is one of the most useless
interfaces I've used.

~~~
DevFactor
I am a BizSpark member, and my blog:
[http://www.devfactor.net](http://www.devfactor.net) is hosted there. I CAN
say that when I got ~500k page-views in the last week of December Azure held
up fine.

In terms of performance, it is pretty good for the price (free).

My only issue has been the down-time, Its actually been down more than my
previous Linux host. I hope MS can figure out how to keep it online a bit more
often :)

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amazon_not
"The cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a
rate that you can't begin to match with your limited resources, generalist
gear, bloated software stacks, slow supply chains, and outdated innovation
paradigms."

If the cloud is so great, how come it's so much cheaper to rent a dedicated
server at scale?

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untog
Because it's a lot more difficult to scale. EC2 allows you to spin instances
up and down, balance load between then and cluster databases, etc. etc.

If you know all you need is one server, dedicated is great. If you need
flexibility, less so.

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latch
Nothing you mentioned, spinning instances up and down, balancing between them,
clustering databases, is exclusive to EC2, AWS or "cloud" computing in
general.

Scalability is largely a _design_ exercise, not, as much as AWS sales
engineers want your CTO/CFO to believe, an infrastructure exercise. At the
point where infrastructure becomes an issue, you're building your own AWS.

I'm happy to admit that AWS might make _some_ of this easier, but it's almost
certainly going to be more expensive [1], and it's often at the cost of
flexibility (lock-in, AWS-specific knowledge).

How are dedicated servers, or even collocated servers, possibly less flexible?

[1] There are exceptions, S3 and Route53 stand out as, at the very least,
being cost-competitive to a greater extent than other AWS/Cloud offerings.

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jmccree
I'm unaware of any dedicated provider that will let me take a $20/mo small
instance and scale it within minutes to an insanely beef 8 core instance for a
day for about $20 and then back down, with less than 15 mins total downtime.
Total cost for a month less than $50.

One of the things I feel AWS has succeeded at is putting control of
infrastructure in the technology team's hands. In many places dedi or colo
requires contract negotiation with the provider and involves some sort of
purchasing dept. There are some places I've worked with where getting a
dedi/colo could be weeks or months of different teams paperwork. With AWS the
tech team can spin up 100 servers with no outside involvement needed after the
initial work of getting an aws account with $x-xxx k/mo limit.

It's hard to beat the operational flexibility AWS provides, but I can see a
few scenarios where creating your own mini private cloud out of dedi/colo
servers could be more cost effective.

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amazon_not
> I'm unaware of any dedicated provider that will let me take a $20/mo small
> instance ...

You are looking in the wrong places. Dedicated server providers offer
dedicated servers. What you want is a VPS. There are dozens of VPS providers
with a multitude of products and billing by the minute or by the month and
everything in between.

> In many places dedi or colo requires contract negotiation with the provider
> and involves some sort of purchasing dept. There are some places I've worked
> with where getting a dedi/colo could be weeks or months of different teams
> paperwork.

This is merely a failure on the part of your employer.

> It's hard to beat the operational flexibility AWS provides, but I can see a
> few scenarios where creating your own mini private cloud out of dedi/colo
> servers could be more cost effective.

It's more like the other way around. To refute my point, please give some
examples where AWS is cheaper AT SCALE.

AWS might make some things easier or more convenient, but in no way does it
come cheaper at scale as their PR flak claims.

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atom_enger
AWS has really taken the IaaS thing seriously. I don't think about failed hard
drives, power supplies or switches anymore.

I think about the health of my applications and design them to fail gracefully
when failures happen. You can do this with hardware but then you've got to go
to the DC or send someone there to fix it. It's not just an API call away from
being fixed.

~~~
jcrites
Great way to think about it! Running applications in a highly automated way is
just so _freeing_.

I define my server fleet as an AutoScalingGroup. If any machine fails, a
replacement is brought online and begins taking traffic automatically - taking
only a few minutes. No operator intervention needed.

As a person who once had to recover failed machines manually and individually,
it's a beautiful feeling. Not to mention the enormous flexibility of being
able to launch additional machines at any time, or automate the scale-up
process.

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kodablah
"All 14 other cloud providers combined have 1/5th the aggregate capacity of
AWS (estimate by Gartner)", yet the slides say "5X the cloud capacity in use
than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers". The "in use" part is very
important to include in the sentence as it makes a difference to understand
capacity vs just having a lot of customers.

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gtirloni
I don't buy networking gear so this claim that it's getting more expensive
over time really caught me by surprise. Anyone know why?

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gbrindisi
Maybe it is because the more people switch to cloud services the less hardware
they need to buy. And then if the hardware manufactures can't do economy of
scale, the cost of production will rise.

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percept
I often wonder about the implications of having the U.S. government
(increasingly) running in Amazon's cloud...

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click170
Not just the government, probably most of the sites you visit in one way or
another link to Amazon. Look at how many sites go down when there's an AWS
outage.

What does this mean for personal privacy when most of the services you use are
backed by one platform?

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Carrok
You make it sound like there is one shared database for everything. AWS does a
great job of internal firewalling and separation.

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dredmorbius
"AWS outage" can mean various things, but there are and have been AZ-wide
outages, and given the difficulties of replication and redundancy, there are
services which are located (or reliant on -- even if unintentionally) a single
AZ.

So yes, much online infrastructure _does_ have AWS dependencies. Sometimes (by
way of secondary services) in ways that the operators of the service itself
may not be directly aware.

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bluedino
>> Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s
global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (in 2004)

Curious to what that means or how it is measured.

What did Amazon run on in 2004? A warehouse full of E1xk's or had they started
moving to x86 by then?

Are they adding a single cabinet of dense x86 servers each day (which I'm sure
is as powerful as a datacenter full of Sun gear from 10 years ago)?

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ilaksh
EDIT: I have been downvoted. This is not really an article, it is an
advertisement for AWS. Perhaps people don't like me downplaying their
commercial.

The future of the cloud is not AWS. Its not in Amazon's datacenter or some
other company's data center. Its not even necessarily in a server.

The servers are going to mainly go away as we transition slowly from server-
based networking to content-based networking.

That means that the fundamental protocols are completely unconcerned with what
server they are running on or where.

The future is things like Named-Data Networking, Ethereum, distributed apps.

As a stepping stone we might see public clouds that allow you to deploy to ANY
city anywhere in the world, enabled by distributed secure data storage and
other technologies like Docker and OpenStack.

There is absolutely no reason everyone should run their applications on AWS.

We will also eventually move away from vendor-specific REST APIs to systems
built on open semantic interface/data definitions.

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nostrademons
I've been waiting for that to happen for the last 15 years, ever since
Gnutella came out in 2000.

If you're going to claim that's the future, you ought to understand why
distributed content-addressable P2P networks like Chord (created by YC's own
Robert T. Morris), Kademlia, Alpine, and JavaSpaces all failed, and P2P
sharing networks like Napster, Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa were unable to
break out of their illegal-music-sharing niche. And then explain why it's
different this time. If anything, the forces that made distributed hash tables
unworkable in 2001 are _stronger_ now, as Ethernet bandwidth, file size, and
disk space have increased much faster than consumer Internet bandwidth.

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ilaksh
"UCLA, Cisco & more join forces to replace TCP/IP"
[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2602109/lan-wan/ucla-
cis...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2602109/lan-wan/ucla-cisco-more-
join-forces-to-replace-tcpip.html)

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nsx147
"...they built to their own networking designs. Special routers were built."

What an audacious call by Amazon

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selmplz
This is an awesome video about why they had to, and how it works:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5hsL-
JNY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5hsL-JNY4)

