The Scale of AWS and What It Means for the Future of the Cloud

I sincerely hope there are a few top cloud providers fighting for market share. An AWS monopoly is not a good thing.<p>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.<p>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 &#x2F; AD integration.<p>Not clear to me how the rest of the pack will fare.

&quot;The cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a rate that you can&#x27;t begin to match with your limited resources, generalist gear, bloated software stacks, slow supply chains, and outdated innovation paradigms.&quot;<p>If the cloud is so great, how come it&#x27;s so much cheaper to rent a dedicated server at scale?

AWS has really taken the IaaS thing seriously. I don&#x27;t think about failed hard drives, power supplies or switches anymore.<p>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&#x27;ve got to go to the DC or send someone there to fix it. It&#x27;s not just an API call away from being fixed.

&quot;All 14 other cloud providers combined have 1&#x2F;5th the aggregate capacity of AWS (estimate by Gartner)&quot;, yet the slides say &quot;5X the cloud capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers&quot;. The &quot;in use&quot; part is very important to include in the sentence as it makes a difference to understand capacity vs just having a lot of customers.

I don&#x27;t buy networking gear so this claim that it&#x27;s getting more expensive over time really caught me by surprise. Anyone know why?

I often wonder about the implications of having the U.S. government (increasingly) running in Amazon&#x27;s cloud...

&gt;&gt; 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)<p>Curious to what that means or how it is measured.<p>What did Amazon run on in 2004? A warehouse full of E1xk&#x27;s or had they started moving to x86 by then?<p>Are they adding a single cabinet of dense x86 servers each day (which I&#x27;m sure is as powerful as a datacenter full of Sun gear from 10 years ago)?

EDIT: I have been downvoted. This is not really an article, it is an advertisement for AWS. Perhaps people don&#x27;t like me downplaying their commercial.<p>The future of the cloud is not AWS. Its not in Amazon&#x27;s datacenter or some other company&#x27;s data center. Its not even necessarily in a server.<p>The servers are going to mainly go away as we transition slowly from server-based networking to content-based networking.<p>That means that the fundamental protocols are completely unconcerned with what server they are running on or where.<p>The future is things like Named-Data Networking, Ethereum, distributed apps.<p>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.<p>There is absolutely no reason everyone should run their applications on AWS.<p>We will also eventually move away from vendor-specific REST APIs to systems built on open semantic interface&#x2F;data definitions.

&quot;...they built to their own networking designs. Special routers were built.&quot;<p>What an audacious call by Amazon