

Amazon Data Center: 450,000 Estimated EC2 Servers - benatkin
http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-size/

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secabeen
In public lectures by AWS employees they have clearly described their
infrastructure as 1U-based. Heat dissipation is a big part of their costs, and
blade servers trade heat for space, which is a bad trade, as space is cheap
compared to heat management. I'd assume that their infrastructure is not
dense.

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cperciva
_In public lectures by AWS employees they have clearly described their
infrastructure as 1U-based._

They've also described their infrastructure as consisting of racks of 20
servers + a switch, and shown photos of racks full of 2U servers. My guess is
that they have multiple generations of hardware.

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toomuchtodo
Makes sense to run 2U servers; more room for independent disks; no RAID, no
redundancy, 1 disk per virtual machine "slice", so you don't have contention
issues when someone else on the box tries to do a dd from EBS to the local
non-persistant disk.

1U pizza boxes wouldn't have enough physical drives to break up among the
amount of virtual machines you can cram on a box with 64-128GB of RAM.

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timc3
You honestly think you get a disk per instance? Or that a node needs a disk?

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toomuchtodo
Based on non-persistant disk IO tests on an EC2 instance, yes, it appears you
are getting a raw disk.

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mad44
This reminded me of the German tank problem.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem>

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mikejarema
I'm wondering what the "revenue capacity" is for the the entire farm?

I don't know how they virtualize, but even a conservative calculation on
instance capacity (eg. assume each server can support one XL instance on
average) means that they can conceivably bring in $288k per hour.

I'm sure I'm way off with this estimate, is there any evidence out there are
regarding their typical server configuration or utilization rates? Spot
instance prices paint a pretty vague picture about utilization (eg. rates are
pretty much flat over the last month).

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Ecio78
I posted yesterday but fell soon out of scope:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3703456>

I think it would be interesting to know if they are planning to design and
make their own servers like Facebook:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/07/facebook_data_center...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/07/facebook_data_center_unveiled/)

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warmfuzzykitten
With 450,000 servers don't you think Amazon could do a better job of
recommending books for me than just finding books just like the one I just
read? I get better recommendations from the new books table at any self-
respecting bookstore. It's about what I _haven't_ read!

