Internet-scale service infrastructure efficiency

• Authors: James Hamilton
• Venue: Proceedings of the 36th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
• Year: 2009

High-scale cloud services provide economies of scale of five to ten over small-scale deployments, and are becoming a large part of both enterprise information processing and consumer services. Even very large enterprise IT deployments have quite different cost drivers and optimizations points from internet-scale services. The former are people-dominated from a cost perspective whereas internet-scale service costs are driven by server hardware and infrastructure with people costs fading into the noise at less than 10%. In this talk we inventory where the infrastructure costs are in internet-scale services. We track power distribution from 115KV at the property line through all conversions into the data center tracking the losses to final delivery at semiconductor voltage levels. We track cooling and all the energy conversions from power dissipation through release to the environment outside of the building. Understanding where the costs and inefficiencies lie, we'll look more closely at cooling and overall mechanical system design, server hardware design, and software techniques including graceful degradation mode, power yield management, and resource consumption shaping.