Amazon’s Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet

By Robert McMillan
April 18, 2012

Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure is growing so fast that it’s silently becoming a core piece of the internet.

That’s according to an analysis done by DeepField Networks, a start-up that number-crunched several weeks’ worth of anonymous network traffic provided by internet service providers, mainly in North America.

They found that one-third of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day.

Most people still think of Amazon as the internet’s giant shopping mall — a purveyor of gadgets, books and movies — but it’s quietly become “a massive utility” that is either on the sending or receiving end of 1 percent of all of the internet traffic in North America, says Craig Labovitz, a well-known internet researcher and co-founder of DeepField. the rest image by Karin Dalziel