When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowdens revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.
But it looks like the cloud industry is still growing. And in very big way.
The worlds largest cloud computing services services where you can run software and store data without buying your own hardware are run by Amazon, and according to a new study from independent researcher Huan Liu, Amazons operation grew by a whopping 62 percent over the past two years. Whats more, the study shows that growth has been steady since June 2013, when the Snowden revelations first hit the news. In fact, theres been a surge since December of last year.
Lius research does not look at services from Amazon rivals such as Google, Microsoft, or Rackspace. But Amazon is the best barometer for the market as a whole. Software running on Amazon Web Services may account for as much as 1 percent of North American traffic, according to data collected by DeepField Networks, and about one-third of all North American internet users visit at least one site hosted in the Amazon cloud each day.
Liu, the co-founder of a mobile fitness startup called Jamo, first looked into the size of Amazons cloud during his spare time two years ago. He says he did the study just for fun it feels good to be the first one to discover something, he says but his methodical approach provides a rare glimpse into the size and growth of Amazons empire.
Amazon doesnt disclose how many servers it runs, or how much money the service makes. Even in its quarterly earnings reports, cloud revenue is lumped in with money earned from other sources. But Liu noticed a pattern in the way Amazon organized its internet addresses that revealed which addresses were part of the same rack. Since the company publicly lists all its externally facing IP addresses, Liu could determine the total number of racks in the Amazon cloud. He says his method is limited to racks that actually include active applications, so any additional infrastructure that Amazon has installed but not yet used doesnt show up in the study. Liu was originally trying to measure the size of Amazons flagship Elastic Compute Cloud, but its possible that some of the racks are used by other services as well.
Two years ago, he estimated that Amazon had about 450,000 servers, based on an assumption of 64 servers in a rack. But even if we dont know the number of servers in each rack, knowing the number of racks helps us get a sense of the size of the Amazon cloud and its rate of growth.
Amazon runs data centers in several different geographical locations. Two years ago, Liu that the noticed that the U.S. eastern region was much larger than all other Amazon regions, and thats still true today. But the other regions are now growing faster. Oregon saw the biggest increase, growing from 41 racks to 904 in the same period. But Liu also sees growth outside the U.S. Brazil has been one of the most vocal critics of NSA surveillance, but Sao Paulo was Amazons second fastest growing region, ballooning from 25 racks to 122 between March 2012 and February 2014.
Certainly, there are good reasons for businesses to be wary of putting their software and data on such services either in the U.S. or on foreign soil. Hosting data on Amazon servers in Brazil rather in the states may help protect customers from some types of surveillance from the U.S. government, but it may not prevent all. And American companies operating on foreign soil such as Amazon in Brazil are still bound by the U.S. Patriot Act to hand over data if its requested by the government. People have been grappling with this conundrum for years. But there are also dangers in hosting software with foreign operations or even on your own servers. These cloud issue is hardly cut and dry.
What we can say is that the cloud is still growing despite the NSA.
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Amazon's Cloud Keeps Growing Despite Fears of NSA Spying