

Tanks in the Cloud - zwilliamson
http://www.economist.com/node/17797794?story_id=17797794&CFID=153404171&CFTOKEN=88391942

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ghshephard
The Economist goes to a lot of effort to describe something that is not
particularly relevant to getting a sense of the scale of AWS - these are
"virtual" instances, which may be spun up and removed fairly rapidly. All we
really get is a sense of the transactional volume of instance creation. This
is further confused by the roll out of new EC2 products - it's well within the
realm of possibility for an individual to roll out 1000 Micro EC2 AMI
instances in a single day when experimenting.

In particular, The Economist fails to justify the statement "The results
suggest that Amazon’s cloud is a bigger business than previously thought."

More interesting to me, would be the number of _physical_ servers, and their
characteristics, in the Data Centers. Or, probably as useful, is the number of
"Instance-Hours" along with the scale of those instances.

The most interesting part of the article, for me, was my first (that I can
recall - Google Trends shows it's been around for two years) exposure to the
phrase IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). I guess it makes sense that if we
commonly use SaaS (Software...), and, in the last year, PaaS (Platform...),
that we should bring it back full circle.

I do take exception, BTW, with the phrase "The most interesting layer—the only
one that really deserves to be called “cloud computing”, say purists—is
“infrastructure as a service”". I was present at the birth of Loudcloud in
September of 1999, one of the first (alas for my Stock Options, failed)
attempts at a "Cloud Platform" - and I assure you that we had no intention, at
the time, of providing the 'infrastructure' as a service. It was all about the
Databases and Applications servers.

~~~
russell_h
I worked up some of the original numbers for Cloudkick, and while it doesn't
look like it made it into the article, we did try to estimate the actual
number of machines running on EC2 (we mostly stuck to US-East) at any one
time. In short, based on the incrementing IDs we knew the total number of
machines that had been launched. By looking at EC2 machines we've monitored at
Cloudkick (at the time, a good portion of the well over 1M servers we had seen
were on EC2) we were able to get an idea of what portion of all machines
launched on EC2 are still running.

I don't recall the actual numbers off the top of my head, and surely there is
some selection bias in servers Cloudkick monitors, but we eventually worked up
some estimated revenue numbers and they were right in there with the
$500m-$750m (independent) estimates mentioned in the article, so at least we
seemed to be in the ballpark.

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jackfoxy
Summary for 2010: all SaaS has sales of $11.7 billion; PaaS (I think they mean
services like SalesForce, AppEngine, and Azure where you write your apps on
their service) $311 million; Amazon $500 million.

Add it all together and you have roughly the size of the remaining U.S. steel
industry which is rapidly giving ground to China. My point being the cloud is
going to be a sorry economic substitute for dismantling the U.S. manufacturing
base.

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ximeng
Original source for most of this is at

<http://www.jackofallclouds.com/2010/12/recounting-ec2/>

