Monday, February 13
We’ve got a couple of big announcements on tap. The first is related to the next stage of our growth as the leading provider of open cloud solutions to support next-generation applications. The second is a large reference customer who is providing yet another proof point for the Cloudscaling approach to cloud building. Get all the details on Monday.

Also on Monday, Randy Bias and David Bernstein will be lending their expertise to the Carrier Cloud Forum at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. First, Randy will co-present on the main stage with one of our reference clients about a new open cloud deployment. Later that day, Randy and David will participate on panels featuring current cloud use cases and choosing cloud models that fit the unique requirements of carriers and service providers.

Tuesday, February 14
We know, it’s Valentine’s Day. But, before you go out on your date, come hear Randy talk about the love of Cloudscaling’s life: Open and Scalable Clouds. He’ll give his talk on the main stage of David Linthicum’s Architecture track. Randy will highlight the factors driving adoption of open clouds. He’ll examine the role open clouds play in supporting next-generation applications that leverage the power of web technologies, mobile computing and big data processing to drive new business initiatives. And you’ll still have time to pick up some candy and flowers afterwards.

Wednesday, February 15
Over in Scott Bils’ Organizational Readiness track, Cloudscaler Francesco Paola will give a lightening talk along with Toby Ford of AT&T. They’ll offer practical examples of organizational readiness issues in large, open cloud deployments. Cesco will talk about KT, and Toby about AT&T. They’re sharing the stage with Simon Wardley, a Cloudscaling advisor and prolific writer on the topic of cloud disruption, both in terms of business models and organizational preparedness. Later in that same track, Cesco will join a panel discussing how to train for, hire, and incentivize IT professionals with the right cloud skills.

On Wednesday evening, we’re having a cocktail party to celebrate the big week. Join us from 6:00 until 8:00 pm in the Magnolia room at the Hyatt Santa Clara (attached to the Santa Clara Convention Center where Cloud Connect is taking place).  We’ll have food, drinks, music and conversation about open clouds and what we’re hearing at Cloud Connect. (Check out the invitation to get a sneak preview of our new branding.)

We’d like to thank our partner, Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP), for co-sponsoring the event with us. They’ve been an important team member on several projects with us, and we’re thrilled they’re joining us.

One more thing… we’re hearing that there might be an OpenStack event later that evening. If it comes through, we’ll be sure and let you know about that as well.

Registering for Cloud Connect
If you’re coming to the Carrier Cloud Forum or Cloud Connect, register here and use the discount code CLOUDSCALING to take 25% off the day-of admission price.

We hope you can join us for some or all of what will be a milestone week in our company’s young history.

The Cloudscaling blog has a loyal following as can be seen from the website and RSS feed stats. As many of you long time readers know, I’ve been ‘in the game’ working on cloud computing technology or blogging about as long as anyone except perhaps those at AWS. In all of that time, my thinking and assessment of what’s happening and how it’s evolving has changed continuously. What was interesting for me this year is that this continuously changing perspective slowed to a crawl or perhaps even stopped. 2011 is the year that much of my thinking and perspective on cloud computing, particularly infrastructure clouds (aka “IaaS”) hardened.

That sounds tough. “Hardened.” I don’t mean hardened in the sense of rigid, but rather in the notion of wet cement drying. Many things that have seemed up in the air now seem settled and my doubts about the future of infrastructure clouds are gone. They are not only here to stay, but the shape and direction of them seem very clear. I’m not certain everyone else is clear, but I am. Perhaps I will be wrong, but I doubt it.

Let’s take a look back at the arc of my thinking and how things did NOT change in 2011. That will tell us what 2012 is likely to look like.

The Evolution of My Cloud Thinking
My thinking evolved through three clear phases:

Automation -> VMs & Virtual Datacenters -> New IT Paradigm

Phase 1: Automation
About this time of year, in late 2006, a short time after Amazon EC2 launched, myself and others prototyped a cloud application management framework similar to RightScale. At that time RightScale was named something else and had not been funded or publicly launched. These were early days.

As someone with a deep passion for automation, I remember thinking then that a lot of my lifetime interests (networking, storage, security, and systems management) were all converging and being managed by automation. For me, what was happening was all about automation … and lots of it.

Phase 2: Virtual Machines & Virtual Datacenters
Roughly summer of 2008, the first “CloudCamp” was thrown where a number of the cloud bloggers and thought leaders came together for the first time. Unknowingly we all centered about using the term ‘cloud computing’ to explain what this new emerging phenomena was. It was right after this event and over the summer of 2008 that the term “cloud computing” really took hold. This also led to the formation of the “clouderati”  and I simultaneously joined GoGrid as the VP Technology Strategy.

Perhaps GoGrid biased my thinking, but I started to move from a perspective that was cloud application centric back into my sweet spot of physical infrastructure and a focus on virtual datacenters or what I called at the time, “cloud centers”. In this view, virtual machines were king and inevitably, the question was: “how will we model existing datacenter environments?”

Phase 3: Cloud Computing is a new kind of IT
After leaving GoGrid in the summer of 2009 I had the opportunity to step back and take a fresh look at how things had evolved. I wanted to build my own cloud business again, but I wanted to skate to where the puck would be, not where it was today. I also could see that most everyone involved in the cloud computing space was spending time trying to retrofit the notion of ‘cloud computing’ to their existing business models and technology. Simultaneously, I still didn’t see any serious competitors to AWS.

What were they doing that was so different??

It’s not well known, but in the beginning of Cloudscaling’s (re)formation in fall of 2009 into mid 2010, I did a number of strategic and due diligence engagements on various IaaS vendors for VC firms, Platform-as-a-Service startups, enterprises, and enterprise vendors. During that time I was involved in deep technical dives on the technology and business models for these IaaS vendors. They ranged from GoGrid competitors to more of an enterprise cloud model. By late 2010 Cloudscaling, collectively, had deep architectural and business model understanding of roughly 10 different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) players, not including the IaaS clouds that we helped build [1]. I am not sure anyone else had or has that understanding today. What we saw, was telling.

My primary takeaway was that even when it came to startups and direct AWS competitors, absolutely none of the infrastructure cloud players were developing their clouds like AWS. For the most part, they were simply integrating common-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to mimic an AWS-like environment. None of them had AWS velocity [2], nor were they paying attention to what made AWS special [3]. All too often, they identified ‘flaws’ in AWS that were instead unrecognized strengths. Examples of this include:

• Constrained feature set
• Standardized instance sizes
• Lack of VLANs [4]
• Ephemeral storage
• Generic load balancing service without fancy vendor lock-in features [5]

That’s when I began to understand that ‘cloud computing’ had less to do with automation or virtual machines/datacenters on demand and more to do with *how* AWS was building their infrastructure cloud.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Why isn’t VMware more successful in the public cloud space if it’s just VMs and VDCs?
• Why isn’t there a VMware-based competitor at similar scale to AWS? Or even close?
• There are now 100+ “VMs on demand” competitors, but almost none have the same growth rate as AWS … why not?
• What do the largest Internet giants (Amazon, Google, Facebook, SFDC) all have in common from an architectural standpoint and how is that different from a typical enterprise datacenter?

Cloud Computing vs. Enterprise Computing
I gave the third opening keynote at Cloud Connect 2011, behind Werner Vogels of Amazon and Lew Tucker of Cisco. That keynote drove much of the discussion during the first day around ‘enterprise clouds’ and their viability. In that talk was also the initial crystallization of my infrastructure cloud thinking:

We didn’t have one way to build infrastructure clouds … we had two.

One was rooted in the old modalities and thinking around existing datacenters and enterprise applications. The other was rooted in a new way of thinking about Information Technology (IT) that uprooted every approach that had gone before.

Enterprise Computing applied to ‘infrastructure cloud’ [6]:

• How do I virtualize and manage my existing datacenter apps?
• How do I achieve bottom line cost savings and extend server consolidation?
• How can my existing vendors help me create a ‘private cloud’?
• How can I be compatible with everything I own today?

Cloud Computing applied to ‘infrastructure cloud’:

• What can we do to allow application developers to experience ‘infinite scalability’?
• How can we simplify the allocation of traditional IT resources of networking, storage, and compute?
• What will it take to help next generation web applications ‘scale’ by simply adding more of these IT resources?
• How do we make it continually less expensive such that application developers can consume as much as they need?
• How can I, the service provider, make my cost of capital equipment and operational management as low as possible so I can pass those savings on to app developers? [7]

These are two very different schools of thought. One is about saving money for existing datacenters and applications. The other is about enabling new revenue streams via new applications and unlocking the potential for developers to add value to the business. The starkest example of this I can think of can be found in my blog interview with Adrian Cockcroft, the chief architect at Netflix on their adoption of Amazon Web Services [8].

A brief aside: This is why I think the NIST definition of cloud computing is such a huge FAIL. It’s focus is on the superficial aspects of ‘clouds’ without looking at the true underlying patterns of how large Internet businesses had to rethink the IT stack.  They essentially fall into the error of staying at my ‘Phase 2: VMs and VDCs’ (above).  No mention of CAP theorem, understanding the fallacies of distributed computing that lead to successful scale out architectures and strategies, the core socio-economics that are crucial to meeting certain capital and operational cost points, or really any acknowledgement of this very clear divide between clouds built using existing ‘enterprise computing’ techniques and those using emergent ‘cloud computing’ technologies and thinking. [9]

How 2011 Unfolded …
Ever since that keynote at Cloud Connect, it’s become more and more clear that not only is cloud computing a new disruptive displacement of the existing IT model (see blog link just above) in the same way that enterprise computing (aka ‘client-server’) displaced mainframe computing, but that it’s directly intersecting with other major trends in technology.

Infrastructure cloud computing directly intersects and either enables or works with:

• Big data, the explosion of data and data processing needs
• The post-PC era, or the notion of the rise of appliances and mobile platforms as the long term predominant platform, and the shift to ‘apps’ from ‘desktops’ [10]
• Consumerization of IT (TrendMicro whitepaper in PDF), or the notion that knowledge workers prefer more adaptive and flexible environments to get their work done such as they experience in their private lives with the large web application providers (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.)

I’m probably overlooking other related trends here, but what is blindingly obvious is that all of these trends are new opportunities, not old. Nor are they a re-hash of old opportunities. Every single one of them are driving infrastructure cloud computing growth. From the hidden, such as Apple’s iCloud, to the obvious, such as becoming the de facto platform for building big data or mobile app backend services.

As 2011 draws to a close this weekend, I’m beginning to see the upcoming ‘trough of disillusionment’ or ‘chasm’ as Geoffrey Moore called it.

Writing -> Wall
We are five years in and no one has emerged as a legitimate challenger to AWS’s market dominance. And, frankly, none are on the horizon. The enterprise infrastructure cloud providers I’m aware of have terminally poor growth rates (<10% CAGR in many cases) and most of them won’t see a return on investment before they hit their five-year hardware refresh cycle. Translation: these enterprise clouds are essentially net losses when evaluating them on a 5-year TCO basis. The hardware itself won’t even be paid for during that time, much less the cost of operations.

Meanwhile, AWS will reach $1 billion in revenue this year and those few that are following roughly the same trajectory as AWS have at least similar growth rates, if not scale (see slide 11).

While VCE touts $1 billion in vBlock sales [11], the onslaught of so-called ‘shadow IT’ hasn’t ceased or slowed down if AWS growth is any indication. Most of these ‘private cloud’ deployments have failed to deliver on the promise of cloud computing, hence app developers still adopt AWS in droves. Frankly, it’s stunning how many of the Fortune 1000 are running production apps, mostly next gen web apps or re-architected versions of last gen web apps, on AWS, but won’t talk about it.

The Road Ahead: 2012
In 2012, we’re going to see the gap between ‘enterprise clouds’ and ‘web-scale clouds’ widen as we enter the chasm. At Cloudscaling we are already seeing just about everyone with an ‘enterprise cloud’ out researching ‘low cost’ alternatives. Unfortunately, this is still missing the forest for the trees, as business agility and top-line revenue growth is a far more compelling value proposition for web-scale clouds.

I believe that 2012 will be a time of experimentation, learning, and quite possibly even larger ‘cloud failing’ than has gone before. Before it can get brighter, it’s got to get darker.

I don’t know the ultimate solution, but one thing is for certain, we’re all going to learn a lot making it through the chasm to the other side. The only other thing I can tell you for certain is that mimicking existing enterprise datacenters is a ‘looking back’ rather than ‘leaning forward’ strategy.

In this coming year I plan to spend a lot more time on this blog and in speaking engagements exploring all of these ideas, thoughts, and revelations in more depth.

–Randy Bias
Co-Founder & CTO, Cloudscaling

1. Architecting apps to be cloud-ready is key
2. Architecting massive-scale clouds to handle massive-scale updates is critical to a successful security strategy; see #1
3. AWS again shows that the web scale cloud model has distinct advantages over enterprise clouds running legacy enterprise apps that can’t support rapid cycling of many VMs in a short period of time

Here’s a roundup of what else is being said:

• GigaOm
• PCWorld
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Computer Reseller News
• Light Reading
• CMS Wire

A copy of one of the emails that was sent out by AWS is below, with the customer information redacted, of course. Apparently many of these have been received. My source claims this is one of several they received. They are running 100s of instances and about 80% are affected.

Please comment or email info@cloudscaling.com if you have any additional information!

UPDATE: Good catch from @johnleach finding this recent Debian/Xen security announcement that may be relevant.

UPDATE2: I am live-tweeting new information as it comes in.  Latest is that we have confirmed that both 32-bit and 64-bit instances affected.  Some speculation that any instance booted before 12/5/2011 is affected, which is probably most of AWS globally.  Best guess is the above security advisory is the root cause (CVE-2011-1166) of the reboots and AWS is probably just being cautious rebooting 32-bit instances.

From: Amazon Web Services
Subject: Amazon EC2 Maintenance – Reboot Required
Date: December 6, 2011 11:35:53 AM EST

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

One or more of your Amazon EC2 instances have been scheduled for a reboot in order to receive some patch updates. Most reboots complete within minutes, depending on your instance configuration. The instance(s) that will be rebooted and your scheduled reboot time(s) are listed below.

Region        Instance ID    Maintenance Window
=================================================================
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-15 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-15 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-15 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-15 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-18 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-18 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-18 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-18 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-18 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-18 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-18 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-18 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot
us-east-1 i-xxxxxxxx 2011-12-21 04:00:00 UTC – 2011-12-21 10:00:00 UTC instance-reboot

No action is required on your part. Each reboot will occur during the corresponding scheduled maintenance window listed above. Note that when a reboot is done, all of your configuration settings are retained. You also have the option to manage these reboots yourself at any time prior to the scheduled maintenance window.

If you do want to manage your reboots for yourself, or simply want more information on the reboot process, please visit the Amazon EC2 Maintenance Help Page at: http://aws.amazon.com/maintenance-help/

All scheduled events for your Amazon EC2 instances can also be found on the Scheduled Events page in the AWS Management Console at:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?#s=ScheduledEvents

Additional details on how to see your scheduled events, as well as additional details on how to manage them yourself can be found in the Amazon EC2 User Guide at: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/monitoring-instances-status-check.html

Should you have any questions or concerns, the AWS Support Team is available on the community forums and via AWS Premium Support at:
http://aws.amazon.com/support

Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services

This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services LLC, 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210

Building a cloud that works like AWS or Google involves a complete rethink of just about every concept considered canonical in enterprise IT for the past 20 years.

This is the message Randy Bias and Lew Tucker (Vice President and CTO, Cloud Computing at Cisco) delivered on the main stage CloudBeat 2011 last Wednesday.

High-level takeaways from the video (embedded below) include:

Enterprise IT is not ready to do real cloud. AWS is growing phenomenally: perhaps $1b in 2011 revenue and a 100% CAGR. But even with this market approval, enterprise IT is not psychologically prepared to run their infrastructure the way AWS does. Most large enterprises and service providers still design with the philosophy that each application architecture drives its own infrastructure architecture. The only successful public clouds turn that idea on its head.

Uptime at scale is in the software, not the hardware. Designing failover into the software – rather than the hardware – is another source of dissonance when moving from the enterprise IT mindset to cloud design. At scale, you cannot avoid hardware failure, so successful public clouds manage it though software architecture.

Open source is only part of the answer. Open source software is the only way to go if you want to build a cloud the way AWS and Google do. It’s not easy, though. More than 80% of your time will be spent dealing with issues beyond the cloud OS.

People do not need need to know what’s in the box. The box delivers an SLA and a set of services. It’s an appliance. This defines the move toward a utility computing model. You get one of 2-3 configurations for different classes of workloads, and that’s it.

If you skip through the introductions, the video is just under 20 minutes.

A conversation last week between Randy Bias and mobile analyst/Asymco founder Horace Dediu maps out how this diversity of new business models will evolve. Hosted at 5by5, Randy and Horace discuss the emergence of the “super platform” that is making it all possible. The first 20 minutes or so sets the table, with a discussion of how cloud computing and mobile ecosystems fit the definition of disruption theory. Then, Randy and Horace dig in:

• Enterprise hardware vendors are facing big challenges because their legacy computing model is at odds with the way web-scale clouds are being built to support emerging mobile ecosystems.
• Web-scale solutions are simple, and simplicity – in the hardware, architecture, stacks, networking – is critical to designing large systems that can be cost-effectively supported.
• Google operates as many as 10,000 physical servers with one employee. You can’t do that without a radical new approach to data center architecture.
• Apple, Android and other mobile device platforms are defining the post-PC era because of their ability to collect user-level data and take it to a cloud-based backend where it is aggregated and analyzed. Then, data can be fed into a wealth of new application concepts that offer previously impossible benefits at very low cost to users.
• A look at how we’ve shifted from a hardware-centric view of the world (hardware availability) to a platform-centric view (ecosystems) to a super-platform-centric view (ecosystems enabled by cloud). Examples include iOS, Silk browser, Siri, Facebook, and Android. Users extract new value from trading personal data for aggregate knowledge.
• Net-centric business models take advantage of aggregated data from users to provide them with new and very compelling ways to understand the world they live in and interact with it. The Quantitative Self Movement and other crowdsource apps are examples of powerful concepts that were not possible before powerful edge devices connected to web-scale cloud.
• This, coupled with voice, location-based services, augmented reality and situational awareness, puts us on the front end of an explosion of new app and business model possibilities.
• What do mobile network operators bring to the table that’s more valuable than AWS? A global footprint. Ownership of the IP backbone. Ownership of mobile network. OSS/BSS (billing system) integration. Low latency.

Randy and Horace conclude with a discussion of the utility business model and how IT organizations are adapting their thinking to embrace it.

Listen in on their conversation and check out Horace’s post, then tell us how you see the “twin disruptions” unfolding.

Randy will participate in two sessions. First up, Randy will moderate a fireside chat with Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix. The conversation will focus on how Netflix is expanding its engagement with AWS globally. Adrian will offer his thoughts regarding whether or not anyone can close the lead AWS has opened up in public cloud. He’ll also give his candid opinion of OpenStack.

Next up, Lew Tucker of Cisco will join Randy in a conversation about how the opportunities in cloud look very different today than they did two years ago. And if you take a thoughtful look at how the industry has evolved, several useful patterns begin to reveal themselves. Understanding this mosaic can lead to better deployment strategies, better business models and smarter cloud startup investments. They’ll talk big data, web-scale cloud, open systems and more.

If you’re in the Bay Area, come join us. There’s a discount if you follow this link.

• Cloud computing is an entirely new model for IT
• This model displaces ‘enterprise computing’ (or ‘client/server’) just as that model displaced ‘mainframe computing’
• “Enterprise clouds” are therefor just ‘virtualization 2.0′ or ‘false clouds’ as some  would call them
• AWS growth is largely driven by next generation applications that CANNOT be serviced by enterprise clouds: big data, mobile applications, SaaS, and others with very elastic and scale-hungry workloads
• Next generation apps are designed for the AWS-style cloud (aka ‘web scale’) where typical enterprise concerns (e.g. “I need my VM to *never* fail”) are immaterial

For the sake of argument, let’s assume this is all correct.  Trust me, there are plenty of people who would argue I’m wrong, but let’s just say that the above argument is correct.

In this world, what more can AWS do to help web-scale applications succeed?  They already provide infinite, or near infinite, computing capacity, storage, and networking on-demand.  They also provide a bevy of higher order services from queuing to relational databases and PaaS.

AWS is very effectively removing the need for typical IT infrastructure staff by delivering developer centric offerings.

Assuming this continues, what more can they do to enable next generation web-scale applications and the developers who are building them?  I am extremely interested in your thoughts.

For further background, please see my answer to the Quora question: “In what ways is AWS better than most of it’s competitors.”

• “Cloud management” is a term that confuses the market. Smart cloud architects must figure what vendors using this term really mean: virtual server management, application management, infrastructure management, governance management, or some other function in a particular layer of the stack?
• PaaS has huge potential, but it’s struggling because people think they understand SaaS and IaaS better and hence focus their efforts there first.
• OpenStack’s rapid rise underscores how big the demand is for an open cloud environment that scales. The desire, however, is ahead of the technology, and there’s more smoke than fire in OpenStack at the moment. That’s changing fast, as companies like CloudScaling, Piston, and Nebula put OpenStack clouds into production.
• Cloud.com’s CloudStack is not truly OpenStack. Speculating that Citrix’s purchase of the company was largely defensive, Randy suggests that the bidding war to win Cloud.com might have led Citrix to look for ways to monetize its investment. Wrapping CloudStack in the OpenStack banner would be one way to get there.

Watch the video, and tell us what you think.

The estimates of AWS revenue come from my 2009 blog posting estimate (~250M), UBS numbers and estimates for 2010/2011, and extrapolating the predicted roughly 100% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that AWS seems to be on.  Note that some data we have show much faster growth such as AWS’ published numbers for S3 which show >150% CAGR for that service.

Another data point is that if you look at the 10-Q numbers for AMZN Other you will notice that the ‘Other’ line is now AMZN’s fasting growing line of business at >80% CAGR for their entire top line with electronics, their second fastest growing line of business down from 75% CAGR in 2010 to ~50% CAGR in 2011.

In other words, the ‘Other’ is now Amazon’s fastest growing business, it’s accelerated over the past several years, *and* we are in a recession.  Oh, and if that weren’t enough, according to my research, AMZN sees a huge quarter-over-quarter bump in Q4 every year (~40%).

Bottom line is that AMZN Other will be at 1.3B ending this year with roughly ~1B in AWS alone.

I also ran the numbers out to 2013 using the previous 5 years of growth to see what happens and you can see for yourself.  AWS could be 4B in 2013.  4B in 7 years.  These numbers and trajectory also reinforce my previous predictions about total AWS size in 2016.