Cloud computing is all the rage at the moment, and the latest news suggests it now plays a fundamental role in the average user's activities. A recent finding suggests 1% of all internet traffic in North America is attributed to Amazon's cloud services, with one third of all internet users accessing the service in some capacity at least once a day.
DeepField Networks, which specialises in cloud intelligence, posted an analysis on Wednesday which puts Amazon in the spotlight for the amount of traffic and influence it has over the average internet user. It isn't a complete surprise given that several popular sites such as Netflix, Pinterest, Dropbox, Instagram and Reddit all use Amazon's cloud infrastructure to deliver their services to users.
Craig Labovitz, co-founder of DeepField, told Wired.com: "My mother, for example, has heard of Facebook. She’s heard of Google. She buys stuff from Amazon. But I don’t think most people realize just how pervasive Amazon is becoming." It was revealed that TRUSTe.com was the highest traffic rated website using Amazon's cloud services, TRUSTe being a company specialising in analytics and advertising. When you consider TRUSTe's tracking programs and advertisements being utilised on millions of webpages, it's no surprise Amazon has managed to gain the influence it has so quickly.
The amount of traffic attributed to Amazon's cloud services is huge when you consider that by comparison, Google's YouTube infrastructure alone accounted for 6% of all internet traffic in 2010. Taking into account Amazon's cloud services don't host bandwidth hogging content on a YouTube scale, where one HD video can compare to a million tweets, Amazon's impact on the internet is huge. So much so that when there's an outage, it can reach the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
It's worth noting that the data used in the study is based on subscriber traffic and does not include machine-to-machine communications and the "the nearly constant barrage of scanning/intrusion attempts from China."
11 Comments - Add comment