Why cloud computing needs a completely different datacenter

Cloud computing is a new technology, but Amazon's cloud computing services are now worth billions of of dollars, according to Gartner, whose cloud computing is more than five times times the sum of its 14 biggest rivals. Amazon's simple Storage Service (S3) stores more than 1 trillion files, processing 1.5 million requests per second. DynamoDB (AWS NoSQL database) launched less than a year, October has more than 2 trillion of the input or output requests.

This size provides all of these services requiring a lot of hardware, and cloud computing deployments are growing fast, meaning Amazon needs to keep adding more hardware to its data center.

So how does Amazon do that? The Vice president and distinguished engineer James Hamilton, who was behind the strategy, shared his ideas at the company's Re:invent user conference, and his ideas could be simply summed up as "scale is the catalyst for all work".

Scale has contributed to the development of the company in many ways. First, when a company does something many times, it becomes very good at it. As a result, the more servers that Amazon configures, the better they can summarize best practices. The same applies to data centers. The company is rapidly adding a lot of capacity so that AWS engineers can quickly test their ideas to find out what works and what is not.

AWS has optimized its hardware for its specific use cases. AWS has established custom computing, storage, and Web servers that allow the company to be accurate to granular levels. Its storage servers are denser than any server on the market, and each server weighs more than a ton. Recently, AWS has customized its network devices to create routers and protocol stacks to configure high-performance workloads. These investments will drive new web-based products and services that will be launched in the coming year, Hamilton said. The idea of creating custom hardware is not unique in the industry, and Facebook has created a complete Open-source project-open computing.

AWS even customized its power consumption program. The company has signed a bulk power purchase agreement with its suppliers, providing it with the power needed to access dozens of data centers across the globe for each region. In the eastern United States, the company has more than 10 data centers, the company's largest power consumption area. AWS not only buys power for these areas, it also has its own sub station, which stores power before the power is sent to the data center. This allows the company to expand its offerings as much as possible without having to worry about the power supply as a limiting factor.

AWS says a big goal is to respond to customers. The company recently set up a new data center in the western United States of Oregon State, the 100% carbon medium and data center, and the company's fastest growing data center.

Even with all of these customized devices, AWS cannot accurately predict the amount of resources it will use. If AWS can increase its utilization, it will cost less because they will be able to save more from the hardware. AWS must deploy enough capacity to support its peak utilization, but it is a waste of capacity if the server is not fully utilized. AWS solves this problem by pooling different customer peak workloads. For example, a retailer customer may have a shopping peak during a holiday, while a company that handles tax returns will use resources at another time. By combining the workload of these customers, the company can work on average workload densities.

Of course, there will still be low utilization, but AWS has been trying to turn this into an advantage. For example, the company allows customers to sell their redundant instances to increase utilization.

The size of the company is expanding, and it is the size of the company that drives these efficiencies. With the development of Amazon, AWS will add more functionality to attract more customers, resulting in more growth. Amazon executives say it's a virtuous circle.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)