NOTE: This is partly plagiarised (the crazy maths bits) but it was really just too mind blowing to not share.
In the last 8 years, Amazon AWS, Google and a number of other players have come to dominate the utility computing market. As a consumer of these services, It's sometimes hard to comprehend the sheer scale Cloud Computing has achieved. What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services, also called web services that together make up a cloud computing platform by Amazon.com since 2006. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. The service is advertised as providing a large computing capacity (potentially many servers) much faster and cheaper than building a physical server farm." Even if you have never heard of it, chances are you are using services built upon it. They power 4OD, Dropbox, duolingo, etsy, Foursquare, IMDb, intuit, Kelloggs, NASA, Netflix, Nike, Pinterest, Reddit, the Royal Opera House, Sage, SAP, Shazaam, Sonos, Spotify, SuperCell, TicketMaster and Zumba to name but a few. Just How Big is Amazon Web Services? Simply put, massive. It's not just big; it's off-the-charts-big. According to Gartner, Amazon has over 5 times the number of servers than the next 14 biggest competitors combined. When you consider that these competitors contain the likes of CSC, Google, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Softlayer and VMWare, that gives you a rough idea of just how big AWS really is! AWS offers services from 11 'Regions' across the world and carves each of these up into a number of distinct 'Availability Zones'. There are currently 28 Availability Zones split across the 11 Regions (each Region contains between 2 to 5 depending on location). An Availability Zone is made up of a number of data-centres pulled together so that, from a customer's point of view, the individual data-centres are invisible. Each Availability Zone contains between 2 and 6 data-centres. Amazon don't talk in absolutes, but doing some quick maths (and taking the average of each figure given), we can safely estimate that Amazon is currently running around 100 data-centres around the world (note that even the minimum number possible, based on the figures found, is a respectable 60 data centres. I actually think they must be just shy of 100 - if they had broken that barrier I would have thought that we would have heard about it). Each of these data-centres has between 50,000 and 60,000 servers running at a total of between 25 and 30MW (Amazon states that anything bigger than this and the economies of scale start breaking down - 25-20MW seems to be their sweet-spot). At a minimum, AWS owns 3 million servers and a middle-of-the-road estimate would put Amazon as owning over 7 million servers. And these would draw around 3 Gig-watts (which, if I recall correctly, is more than enough to get you a round trip to 1955). Based on the current US Wholesale electricity price of $36/MWh, their daily electricity bill would be around $10.2 million (or $3.7 billion per year). Noting that Amazon have a long standing pledge to power AWS via 100% renewable sources, it's interesting to note that it would take a 60 square-mile solar farm to achieve this today (the biggest solar farm in the world produces 550MW and covers 9.5 square-miles Another fascinating stat is that everyday Amazon adds enough new server capacity to support all of their global infrastructure when they were a $7B annual revenue enterprise. They also build their own power stations; contrary to popular belief, this isn't because they can do it cheaper (it is cheaper, but only by a very small margin), the reason they roll their own is because the Utility companies can't meet their demand fast enough; they are just not geared up for this pace of change. So how big are their competitors? If we estimate that Amazon has 7m servers (and according to Gartner research, it owns 5x more than the total of the 14 combined), then it stands to reason that the average number of servers owned by their top 14 competitors is around 100,000. A company with 100,000 servers is not to be sniffed at - that's a huge number in itself and would draw about 50MW of power.
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