Steve Ballmer Says Microsoft has Over 1 Million Servers - What Does that Really Mean?

High Scalability

Jul 17, 2013 — 1 min read

James Hamilton in Counting Servers is Hard has an awesome breakdown of what one million plus servers really means in terms of resource usage. The summary from his calculations are eye popping:

Facilities: 15 to 30 large datacenters
Capital expense: $4.25 Billion
Total power: 300MW
Power Consumption: 2.6TWh annually

The power consumption is about the same as used by Nicaragua and the capital cost is about a third of what Americans spent on video games in 2012. Now that's web scale.

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Kafka 101

Capturing A Billion Emo(j)i-ons

Brief History of Scaling Uber

Behind AWS S3’s Massive Scale