My recent Anatomy of an Amazon EC2 Resource ID post and the usage statistics it implied caused quite a stir in the cloud computing community. It’s been an exciting couple of weeks to see the discussion taking place. Needless to say, Amazon continues to keep quiet on the real numbers. In the past weeks new data has come to light, both by further analysis using the ID technique and from fresh sources. I’d like to share a couple of the more intriguing developments with my readers:

• RightScale decided to apply the findings to the mountain of EC2 data they have – a few years worth. Firstly, this solved a few of the remaining puzzles in the ID formula, on the Series ID and Superseries ID (I’ve updated the original post to reflect this). Moreover, the wider perspective led them to estimate that the total number of instances launched is actually a whopping 15.5 million. RightScale’s full findings can be found here.

• Randy Bias published an excellent post stating that Amazon’s EC2 Generating 220M+ Anually – based on “actual verified EC2 numbers plus some guesses and a rough model of its current annual usage”. Bias’s sources tell him Amazon has approximately 40,000 servers running (note that’s servers not instances).

So what is the bottom line? CIO Magazine’s Bernard Golden described it well in his coverage of my research, concluding that “it’s hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that something big is going on, and not just in “toy” applications.”

Something big indeed.