The Stunning Scale of AWS
Todd Hoff (via Steven Sinofsky, comments):
All 14 other cloud providers combined have 1/5th the aggregate capacity of AWS (estimate by Gartner in 2013)
[…]
The cost of networking is escalating relative the cost of all other equipment. It’s anti-Moore’s law. All other gear is going down in cost, networking is getting relatively more expensive over time. Relative monthly costs: servers: 57%; networking equipment: 8%; power distribution and cooling: 18%; power: 13%; other: 4%.
[…]
Amazon’s solution 5 years ago was data driven and radical: they built to their own networking designs. Special routers were built. A team was hired to build the protocol stack all the way to the top. And they deployed all this themselves in their network. All services worldwide run on this gear. […] source of the improvement was simplicity. The problem AWS was trying to solve was simpler than the problem enterprise gear tries to solve. Enterprise gear must adhere to a lot of complicated specs that go unused and only make the system more fragile. By implementing just the functionality that was required meant a much simpler system which lead to higher availability.
