We've long wondered about the scale and profitability of Amazon's fast-growing cloud computing operation, Amazon Web Services. Recent research by Guy Rosen has gleaned some information about the number of public web sites hosted on EC2, as well as daily instance activity on the platform.
Now comes an interesting nugget that offers some insight intoAmazon's data center operations: Randy Bias of CloudScaling says that Amazon is running 40,000 servers to support EC2, citing two sources for the number. Randy uses that as the basis for a calculation of how much revenue Amazon may be generating from EC2 (his ballpark is $220 million to $260 million annually).
Note that the 40,000 server estimate is just for EC2, and doesn't include the S3 cloud storage service or the servers supporting Amazon's massive retail operations. But it's safe to say the new numbers clearly affirms our estimate that Amazon is in the 50,000 server club. See CloudScaling for additional details and Randy's analysis.
