There was a lot of Amazon Web Services-related news last week, though the title of "news" is a little unwarrented. In reality, there were three excellent blog posts. The first had an excellent disection of Amazon's EC2 user IDs, the reverse-engineering of which gives us an estimate as to the size of Amazon's cloud customer base. The estimate is that around 40,000 to 50,000 machines are running inside EC2 right now. From that, others have derived the yearly revenues for Amazon's cloud services: US$220 million. Finally, we have a lengthy examination of what it's like to be DDOS'd when you're hosted in EC2 using EBS. Evidently, it's not a pleasant escalation process. Nor a fast one.

Let's dissect these disections. First of all, $220 million a year, even with a smudge factor, is a nice bit of revenue for a business that, effectively, launched last year. Call it a four-year burn and ramp process with one year's launch. I'd also wager that a certain amount of their revenues are spikey, so there could be some major varience in the actual month-to-month numbers. Additionally, Amazon is not exactly a highly profitable company, historically or currently. That means this number could be a moving target.

Finally, I'd just like to say that the BitBucket fiasco shows that Amazon might be a tad too used to inexperienced users. It may also not quite be ready for the hellish torment that can be unleashed by an angry horde of DOS zombies. I hope they've learned something about cloud security from all this, because I'll say that after reading the account, I learned that troubleshooting major cloud problems is still a giant pain in the patoot.