Amazon cloud powered by close to 500,000 servers
How many servers does Amazon use to keep its EC2 platform afloat? 445,000. That is, according to Huan Liu, a researcher with Accenture Technology Labs, who came up with this number after a little bit of digging and number crunching.
His analysis found that Amazon's main cluster of servers, 322,000 of them, are located in Northern Virginia. Outside of the US however, Amazon has a relatively small footprint. For example in Brazil, there are only 1600 EC2 servers.
Counting clouds is no easy task, as each host could be home to several “virtual” servers, so Liu mapped Amazon's domain name system (DNS) and IP addresses to actual server racks. Assuming a number of 64 servers per rack, Liu says that he's “pretty confident” about the total number, however admits “it's an educated guess”.
