Tag: Amazon

Inside Amazon’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure

aws regions

Here’s a little insight into the Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure:

Amazon operates at least 30 data centers in its global network, with another 10 to 15 on the drawing board.

How big is a data center?

A key decision in planning and deploying cloud capacity is how large a data center to build. Amazon’s huge scale offers advantages in both cost and operations. Hamilton said most Amazon data centers house between 50,000 and 80,000 servers, with a power capacity of between 25 and 30 megawatts.

So, how many servers does the Amazon AWS run?

So how many servers does Amazon Web Services run? The descriptions by Hamilton and Vogels suggest the number is at least 1.5 million. Figuring out the upper end of the range is more difficult, but could range as high as 5.6 million, according to calculations by Timothy Prickett Morgan at the Platform.

Cloud computing price war

Now this looks like a straight up war!  Less than a day apart, both Google and Amazon announced yet another price drop on their services.  TechCrunch sums up Google’s price drop as following:

Google Compute Engine is seeing a 32 percent reduction in prices across all regions, sizes and classes. App Engine prices are down 30 percent, and the company is also simplifying its price structure.

[…]

The price of cloud storage is dropping a whopping 68 percent to just $0.026/month per gigabyte and $0.2/month per gigabyte/DRA.

[…]

BigQuery, Google’s database for doing big data analysis, is getting the largest price drop at 85 percent. The team reduced per-gigabyte storage pricing from $0.08/GB to $0.026/GB, a 68 percent drop, and interactive queries now cost $5/TB instead of $35/TB. Batch queries now also cost $5/TB instead of the previous $20/TB.

Amazon Web Services Blog provides comparison tables between old and new prices, which are quite similar.  And they also notice the following:

If you’ve been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time, and today’s announcement serves as the 42nd price reduction since 2008.

 

Amazon package delivering drones

Holy crap! This is just crazy!  Amazon is working on a project to use drones for ultra fast package delivery (2.5 kg in less then half an hour):

He says we’re four or five years from drones being able to deliver small packages right to your house, largely because the company has to work with the FAA to make sure it’s legally allowed to run the Prime Air program — Amazon doesn’t have Zookal’s luxury of operating in Australia without the FAA’s regulatory oversight.

I always regarded Amazon as an innovative company – but this is in a category by itself.  Welcome to the future, once again.