The 1%: Amazon now carries 1% of all US Internet Traffic
The new 1% is Amazon.
Most people still think of it as a retail store, and as far as most individuals are concerned, that's what it is. But back in 2004 Amazon realized that it was always losing money on retail, but it was really good at managing the retail process. So it started offering its services to other web stores, quickly becoming the back end for a lot of major stores and brands (e.g. Target).
Out of that grew ever more web services, eventually coming to EC2 - the "elastic cloud" server power on demand cloud which is growing rapidly.
Today, that Amazon cloud accounts for 1% of all US internet traffic, according to new research.
The cloud is popular with companies that see big spikes and drops in computing demand. Netflix uses it to handle the back-end of its streaming service, which is in hot demand on Sunday nights and then gets quiet a few hours later. And a supercomputing company called Cycle Computing even managed to build one of the world’s 50 most powerful supercomputers on the Amazon cloud. Hard numbers are rather foggy (har har), but it seems as though Amazon's cloud services are growing at about 50% a year - which is pretty damn fast. They are 5 times the size of their nearest competitor, and are quickly becoming a backbone of the internet.
Long story short: Amazon's future is cloudy.
Most people still think of it as a retail store, and as far as most individuals are concerned, that's what it is. But back in 2004 Amazon realized that it was always losing money on retail, but it was really good at managing the retail process. So it started offering its services to other web stores, quickly becoming the back end for a lot of major stores and brands (e.g. Target).
Out of that grew ever more web services, eventually coming to EC2 - the "elastic cloud" server power on demand cloud which is growing rapidly.
Today, that Amazon cloud accounts for 1% of all US internet traffic, according to new research.
The cloud is popular with companies that see big spikes and drops in computing demand. Netflix uses it to handle the back-end of its streaming service, which is in hot demand on Sunday nights and then gets quiet a few hours later. And a supercomputing company called Cycle Computing even managed to build one of the world’s 50 most powerful supercomputers on the Amazon cloud. Hard numbers are rather foggy (har har), but it seems as though Amazon's cloud services are growing at about 50% a year - which is pretty damn fast. They are 5 times the size of their nearest competitor, and are quickly becoming a backbone of the internet.
Long story short: Amazon's future is cloudy.
Comments
Post a Comment