The invisible "cloud" Amazon provides 1% of Internet traffic

The analysis startup DeepField Networks, - a company that has carried out over several weeks, an anonymous network traffic monitoring internet service providers in North America - has shown that one-third of several million users daily visit at least one site that uses the infrastructure of Amazon.

Most people still think that the Amazon - it's just a huge online shopping mall that sells gadgets, books and movies, writes Wired. However, unbeknownst to users of the company received "massive use of" participating in any way to provide 1% of all Internet traffic in North America, says Leibovitz, Craig (Craig Labovitz), well-known researcher and co-founder of Internet DeepField.

"Many people have even heard of the older Facebook, especially on Google. Millions of users buy things at Amazon. However, I do not think most people realize how widespread is Amazon, - he said. - The number of sites that can now be damaged if the "fall" infrastructure of Amazon, and the increasing expansion of the Amazon, which is not visible to ordinary users, are really impressive. "

Amazon introduced its first cloud service Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, based on technology that it developed during the creation Amazon.com. However, only recently all realize how you can quickly create an online business without actually having their own computers. Currently, Amazon sells more of its resources, data center (storage, database indexing and search) than the cloud itself.

At its "cloud" Amazon could even build a supercomputer that is included in the top 50 most powerful in the world.

As an example, Jason Stowe (Jason Stowe), CEO of Cycle Computing, creating a supercomputer in the "cloud", leads a research pharmaceutical company Schrödinger. Three hours of massive supercomputer resource Amazon for simulation of chemical processes of the company's cost only $ 15 thousand, "It makes available to almost everyone huge amounts of computing with the cloud of supercomputers - he says. - Today, any small company or organization can afford for short period of time using a supercomputer. "

But the big question remains: how large "cloud" Amazon? How many servers provide the work of its data centers? The company, like many other providers of cloud computing, keeps this information secret.

For example, according to Amazon Web Services Blog, last year's S3 cloud service, the company kept 762 billion objects - three times more than in 2010. In the Amazon claim that "every day adds many new facilities that they could support the entire global infrastructure of Amazon.com, the company has available in the first 5 years old when she had $ 2.76 billion annual revenue," the report said Amazon Web Services .

The company has multiple data centers, which she calls "availability zones": in Virginia, on the West Coast, Singapore, Tokyo and Europe, according to Datacenterknowledge. In addition, over the past two years, Amazon has increased the number of IP-addresses for servers in data centers more than five times - with a little more than a quarter million addresses in February 2010 to more than 1.7 million last month.

This shows that the cloud business Amazon is growing faster than most people think: Gartner estimates the growth rate of approximately 30% year on year.