Amazon's Cloud May Provision 50,000 VMs a Day 122
Dan Jones writes "It has been estimated that Amazon Web Services is provisioning some 50,000 EC2 server instances per day, or more than 18 million per year. But that may not be entirely accurate. A single Amazon Machine Image (the virtual machine) may be launched multiple times as an EC2 instance, thereby indicating that the true number of individual Amazon servers may be lower, perhaps much lower, than 50,000 per day. So, even if it's out by a factor of 10 that's still 1.8 million VMs per year. Is that sustainable? By way of comparison, In February of this year, Amazon announced S3 contained 40 billion objects. By August, the number was 64 billion objects. This indicates a growth of 4 billion S3 objects per month, giving a daily growth total of about 133 million new S3 objects per day. How big can the cloud get before it starts to rain?"
Re:ok did a manager write this?! (Score:5, Interesting)
who cares how many potential VMs the "cloud" can host. its methodone for most end users/devs real problems: inefficient code. the "just pitch machines at it until it runs fast!" mentality will catch up to us.
That's not true. We use Amazon's cloud to host some of our servers. The reason we do it is for two main reasons. (1) We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance. Let me repeat that lest you think its not a big deal: We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance! (That is a big deal when you leave your basement but don't necessarily have a dedicated IT staff). (2) We are in a rapid growth phase. We cannot estimate well enough what are computing needs, our storage needs, are going to be 1- 2- 6- months down the road. We also don't have $50k to drop on equipment and storage that may be utilized 6 months from now, but we sure as hell know if we bought it now it wouldn't be used immediately. Amazon's cloud makes it trivial to keep up with our growing demand without paying up front for it. Sure we pay more to "rent" the stuff from Amazon, but its simply the big(O) argument: Amazon's pricing scales worse than the classic alternatives, but the constants out front are tiny.
Re:What is the rain in this analogy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Its too early to predict if the Amazon cloud will do anything meaningful or if its going to be a spectacular failure.
Considering 64 billion objects and counting, if the latter is to happen it's bound to give a whole new meaning to "when it rains, it pours".
Re:tag: Dumbquestion (Score:3, Interesting)
This. Maybe instead of atmospheric clouds, they're talking about the Oort Cloud [wikipedia.org].
I call shenanigans (Score:3, Interesting)
My company tried to provision 10,000 amazon instances to perform scalability testing of our software that runs on many computers. The math was simple - 10,000 servers * $0.15 / hour = $1,500 / hour for testing. We liked the multiple OSes & versions (Linux - Redhat, SLES, Windows - 2000, 2003, 2008?) and software stacks (mysql, apache, websphere, sql server, iis, etc...) that we all available out of the box.
However, if you need more than 20 servers, you have to fill out a form. A sales rep and tech guy called to discuss our needs. It turns out that they could only handle around 1000 instance request across all data centers unless we "reserve" the machines at $300 / each, which blew the math - 10,000 servers * $300 = $3,000,000 to start.
Looking at the article, it is likely that people are re-requesting the same machine be started & stopped multiple times per day - 50,000 is probably off by an order of 10.
Stock Exchange (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to an Amazon's AWS talk in NYC a couple months ago where they brought some start-ups in to talk about their projects, the cloud and how the cloud helped them build their applications faster and better. During the opening talk, the speaker showed some use-cases, one including the New York Stock Exchange and how, at the closing bell, they provision over 3000 EC2 instances to crunch numbers overnight to be ready for the next morning.
A guy from a startup that I was talking to before we were seated was talking about how his company keeps between 5 and 10 instances up all the time for their application (dynamically bringing them up and down to scale with demand) and how they frequently had 4 and 5 sets of these servers running on the side for testing (20-40 instances at a time). He was talking about the metrics they were using to keep track of their use and how it was flawed due to the fact that they had hundreds of instances a day going up and down all the time.
Just because 50,000 instances are started per day doesn't mean that those 50,000 instances are running for any period of time. I frequently bring up an instance, tweak some things, create an image, then bring it down... or bring up an instance to test something for 20 minutes, then bring it down. EC2 has really benefitted my QA/Testing/Experimentation in that I really have an unlimited pool of resources to play with. It's a much more robust system than I have at home with VMWare... vmware was a gamechanger for me since before that, I had 2 physical servers at home and stacks of 40GB and 60GB HDs with multliple versions of OSs on them.
Of course AWS isn't for everyone. EC2 can be expensive for what they offer and the biggest advantage to AWS's services are that they are on-demand and work really well with applications that need to scale up AND down in real-time. If you've got an application that doesn't require to-the-minute scaling responses, it's less expensive to get a physical dedicated server with Xen on it and create your own virtual infrastructure... although if you don't have the skills or time to learn the tools, then AWS offers a much better learning curve.
Re:How is using so many VMs more efficient? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thinl you're missing my point - why have multiple OSes if they're all the same type of OS and the apps could all happily run on the same OS instance? As for deployment - have you never heard of a tarball? OS dies - take app tarball to new server , untar. Hows that different to copying a VM machine file over?
In the real world, people run apps like Exchange or Oracle, which take hours to install to a vanilla state, and that's not counting the potentially terabytes of data associated with them.
Even the most primitive "tar ball" Linux app will have dependencies on the OS, and those can and will eventually break, unless you freeze your OS version forever. If you have enough apps and servers, that will become a nightmare to manage. Do I upgrade or not upgrade? Will this patch or that patch break one of the apps? This is how people end up running Linux 2.2, or 32-bit Windows on 64-bit platforms, because migrating 1 app is hard enough, but migrating a server with 20 apps on it is a recipe for disaster.
Virtualization lets you quite literally drag & drop a running host OS from server to server. During maintenance time, that's like magic. No more 3am hardware replacement jobs for me! You can clone a machine while it's running, isolate the clone onto a virtual network, and test an upgrade without interrupting users. Sure, you can do that with most backup & restore tools, but VM platforms do it quicker, and with fewer admin steps. You don't even need spare hardware.
I once replaced every single hardware component of a running VM farm, servers, cables, switches, even the SAN, while it was running. During the day. Zero outage, no packets lost, no TCP/IP connections closed or user sessions disconnected. We even had terminal server (Citrix) and console (SSH) users on. Not one user even noticed what was going on. I'd love to see you try that with 'tar'.
Re:Please stop... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh man, I was in art school in early 90's. All those AoL CD's were great for material for art projects and stuff.
Re:How is using so many VMs more efficient? (Score:3, Interesting)
having one app conflict with another app. 10 years ago we had a few apps. today there are too many to count and constant point releases where minor functionality is added by user request or small bugs fixed.
and it's not just java apps. weblogic instances, other apps we might buy or code internally. then there is QA since they need everything production has. Moving QA to VMWare was one of the first things we did when we bought it. the QA and Dev SQL servers are still physical, but a lot of their apps are now virtualized