Here’s a fascinating analysis of just how much business Amazon’s EC2 cloud services has. It’s worth a read.
Cloud blogger Guy Rosen deduces the meaning of EC2 resource identifiers and uses them to estimate the number of resources customers provision in a given time period. He figures that in one 24-hour period, one of Amazon’s eastern U.S. regions received 50,242 resource requests, an imposing number.
That puts annual resource requests for that region somewhere north of 18 million – an imposing number when you consider that’s for just one region. What it means for the number of physical servers needed is anyone’s guess.
Rosen acknowledges that he’s basically looking at a black box trying to figure out what’s going on inside, and that has its shortcomings. It’s food for thought, regardless.
And it’s a strong indication – as if another one was needed – that cloud computing services are widely popular. The compelling economics, convenience and flexibility are just too enticing to ignore.
The implications for security remain. Corporate resources that are shifted to a service provider are out of the tight control of the corporation. A third-party provider can deliver secure services, but that should never be taken as a given. Verify providers’ security. Carefully choose what resources are committed to the cloud so if there is a breach, the damages to the company are manageable and known ahead of time and accepted by the business unit leaders who need to be in on such risk-management decisions.
