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Amazon's beautiful Sterling, Virginia, data center. Photo: Eric Hunsaker/Flickr

Its one of Amazons best-kept secrets. How many computers does it take to keep its Elastic Compute Cloud platform afloat?

And now, a researcher with Accenture thinks he has the answer: 445,000. Thats the number that Huan Liu came up with when he did a bit of internet sleuthing. Its a fairly big site; its pretty impressive, he says of the entire EC2 operation.

EC2 is Amazons pay-as-you-go computing service. Its become a popular way to spin up computing power for a corporate skunkworks project or a startup, but its also the back-end for serious online sites, including Netflix and Dropbox.

Lius analysis found that Amazons main cluster of data centers, located in northern Virginia, is truly massive: he guesses that Virginia is home to about 322,000 servers. But he also found that Amazon has a relatively small footprint in other parts of the world. For example, he guesses that there are only 1,600 EC2 servers in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Its hard to compete with Amazon on scale in the US, but in other regions, the entry barrier is lower. For example, Sao Paulo has only 25 racks of servers, Liu wrote in a blog post discussing his findings.

Liu, a research manager with Accenture Technology Labs, took advantage of the way that Amazon organizes its EC2 domains to come up with his estimate, which strikes us here at Wired as a bit of a lowball guess.

Because Amazon relies heavily on virtual computing that is, it can host several software-based virtual servers on a each computer figuring out the number of machines in Amazons data center is a very tough task.

But Liu used a few tricks to link all of Amazons Domain Name System and IP addresses to actual server racks used by the Internet giant. Then, by guessing that each server rack has 64 machines in it, he came up with his total numbers.

He tells Wired that hes pretty confident about the number of racks that Amazon uses. As to whether the company crams 64 or 128 servers in each rack? Well that, nobody knows for sure. Its an educated guess, he admits.

The estimate also leaves out the servers that are powering Amazons Virtual Private Cloud, a hosting service for servers that are kept off the Internet, and which couldnt be measured using Lius techniques.

Go here to read the rest:

Amazon Cloud Powered by 'Almost 500,000 Servers'