More recently, another group of explorers has been attempting to chart a modern-day Amazon: Amazon Web Services, and EC2 in particular.
Guy Rosen used EC2 resource IDs in order to calculate the amount of Amazon EC2 images. Randy Bias then had a very interesting post with "actual verified EC2 numbers plus some guesses and a rough model of it’s current annual usage". Randy, for those who don't know him, was with Grand Central which was an original "B2B Exchange in the Cloud" startup, and it was so long ago that it predated the "other" Grand Central which Google bought for Google Voice.
Joe McKendrick commented that "The EC2 revenues represent about 1% of Amazon’s revenues for the most recent fiscal year. ($19.2 billion.) Amazon has really effectively leveraged the capacity from its retail business to offer services to the rest of the market. Is this something other companies with large IT infrastructures can contemplate?" http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=3022
This is Jeff Bezos' "Risky Bet" (as defined in the famous 2006 BusinessWeek cover article) starting to pay off. One dark cloud (sorry, could not resist) on the horizon is the fact that EC2 appears to be vulnerable to DoS attacks, according to the BitBucket experience over the weekend. Once security and identity management for Amazon Web Services are taken care of, then it looks like Amazon's EC2, unlike the river charted in the 1600s, will be off the charts.
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