It’s been over a year since my original Anatomy of an EC2 Resource ID post. In what became my little claim to fame in the industry, I uncovered the pattern behind those cryptic IDs AWS assigns to every object allocated (such as an instance, EBS volume, etc.). The discovery revealed that underlying the IDs is a [...]

Back in September, I published the Anatomy of an EC2 Resource ID where I pointed out some curious patterns in EC2′s ID scheme and proposed a method of “decoding” these patterns to reveal an underlying serial number. In that post I was careful to write that “while the patterns are indisputable, there remain unknowns and [...]

Two weeks ago, Amazon announced the launch of a new N. California region, us-west-1. This is now the third region in Amazon’s portfolio, following the N. Virginia-based us-east-1 region and the Ireland-based eu-west-1. I got curious to see how fast the new region was being adopted. Luckily, with the Anatomy of an Amazon EC2 Resource [...]

We’ve seen Amazon EC2′s usage. We’ve also seen GoGrid’s usage. In this post, we’ll take a peek at how many servers are being spun up by users of Rackspace Cloud Servers. In the State of the Cloud series Rackspace seems to be a close second to Amazon. Will the usage data provide confirmation of this? [...]

In previous posts, we’ve gone to great lengths to make educated guesses regarding Amazon EC2 usage. Amazon, however, are not alone in the cloud space. It makes sense that we do the same for other providers to get an idea of their comparative levels of usage. In today’s post, we’ll be discussing such an analysis [...]

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 [...]

New technique enables observation of EC2 usage, uncovers stunning data Each time you allocate a resource using EC2 – an instance, a volume or a snapshot – you receive a unique identifier. This is the EC2 resource ID. Have you ever wondered what this ID represents? Well, I did. After noticing similarities between the IDs [...]