AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a service that offers 200 services, including cloud storage. AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world and accordingly has several million customers. Among them are the fastest growing startups, the largest corporations in the world, and major government institutions.
AWS has servers in 26 geographic regions around the world - and more are coming. Australia, India, Brazil, Sweden, Japan, China, and many more countries. The reason for the many server locations is so that if one server fails, another can be used. In the last eight years, the service has seen only four outages, but these were only regional and were quickly resolved.
According to Amazon's financial report published on 2/3/2022, the cloud service accounted for over 55% of the total income of Amazon. Also, the provider owns a cloud market share of over 32%. In 2nd place would be Microsoft with a market share of 20%.
The biggest customers were: Nasdaq, Meta, Stellantis, Rivian, Best Buy, Adidas, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Roche, United Airlines, Walt Disney Company, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Siemens, BMW, Samsung, Netflix, the US government and many more companies and institutions.
So Amazon has control over the market and the government with their cloud services. If every server goes down now, then you can't watch Netflix, you can't book flights, you can't inquire about vaccinations, you can't store video games on cloud platforms. Many economic consequences would then loom. Financial collapses, businesses shutting down, no video conferencing, no social media platforms. So you would hardly have any choices to entertain on your cell phones anymore.
To keep the servers running around the clock, there should of course be plenty of power. But under agreements with the electricity providers in the USA, no figures are published on the electricity consumption of AWS. However, it is assumed that the service requires just under 2% of the total electricity consumption in the USA. That would be just under 76 billion kWh. Amazon has founded "The Climate Pledge" as compensation for this. This sets the goal of making all of Amazon's businesses CO2-neutral by 2040. At AWS, the goal should already be achieved by 2025, according to their website.
Comments