New estimate pegs Amazon's cloud at nearly half a million servers

It's no secret that Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) cluster is big. It powers massive services such as Netflix, Instagram, and Reddit. But just how big is anyone's guess. The retail giant won't say. So, dissatisfied with the company's silence, one man decided to find out.

Huan Liu, a researcher with Accenture Technology Labs, crunched the numbers, and according to his estimates, Amazon Web Services (AWS) boasts just under half a million servers445,000 to be exact.

That may still be a guess, but it's certainly an educated one. Mr. Liu used a process called DNS translation to map out the internal IP addresses of each active AWS instancemade possible, in short, because EC2 publishes all public IP addresses used.

As of March 12, 2012, Mr. Liu estimates the US East data center, based in Virginia, is the largest in size, with 5,030 server racks. Assuming that each rack boasts 64 blade serversan educated guess, as there's no way to know for surethe total would amount to 321,920.

Mr. Liu was also interested in mapping the growth of Amazon's cluster over the past six months, as an indication of the cloud computing industry's overall health. From August 23, 2011 to February 23, 2012, Mr. Liu observed that the US East data centerwhich suffered an outage last Apriladded roughly 110 server racks each month.

For comparisons sake, thats more than Amazons entire So Paulo centre in Brazilthe company's smallestwhich Mr. Liu estimates to have just 25 racks. However, while the growth rate looks roughly linear, Mr. Liu wrote on his blog, recently it is showing signs of slowing down.

Its important to realize that Mr. Lius results, while precise, are still based on assumptions; he admits it is possible that other AWS services, such as S3, SQS and SimpleDB, could run on dedicated racks, which would exempt them from his calculations. Also, if there was no active instance on a rack, it would not be counted in Mr. Lius results.

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New estimate pegs Amazon's cloud at nearly half a million servers

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