Amazon EC2 Shows Amazing Growth

Amazon EC2, the public cloud service offered by Amazon, has been growing at an amazing rate. From their early days of catering to startups, they have grown to have diverse clients from individuals to enterprises. Guy Rosen, the cloud entrepreneur who tracks the state of the cloud, has done some research on the resource identifier used by Amazon EC2 and come up with some interesting stats. I thought I will add it here at Cloud Ave for the benefit of our readers.

• During one 24 hour period in the US East – 1 region, 50,242 EC2 instances were requested
• During the same period, 12,840 EBS volumes were requested
• And, 30,925 EBS snapshots were requested

However, the most interesting aspect of Guy Rosen’s analysis is his calculation that 8.4 million EC2 instances have been launched since the launch of Amazon EC2. These are pretty big numbers showing success for cloud based computing. Kudos to Amazon for the success.

However, I would like to to use this post to once again voice my concern about Amazon’s EC2 pricing. For example, if I setup a small on-demand linux instance and not send ANY traffic towards or from it, I would have to pay $72.00. In my opinion, this is pretty expensive and I am hoping that the competition will eventually drive down the prices. In fact, Amazon has cut the prices of reserved instances by 30% but it is not very appealing to me because on-demand pricing, which is at the very heart of cloud computing, is still expensive. In the case of reserved instances, I am left with the traditional hosting economics and not cloud economics. If Amazon is serious about getting more SMBs and, even, enterprises, they have to price their EC2 offering aggressively.

Anyhow, the success of Amazon on EC2 front is a precursor to the future disruptions in the IT and I am glad to see Rackspace doing well on the Cloud area as well. During the first quarter of 2009, Rackspace has added 8000 customers to their Cloud offerings with a reported earnings of $10.9 Million. A pretty good number for a still nascent cloud unit of Rackspace.

These are interesting times for Cloud vendors and, in spite of the naysayers, cloud computing is real.