At Microsoft’s 2013 Worldwide Partner Conference, CEO Steve Ballmer gave us a very interesting tidbit about the scale of Microsoft’s server operations. “We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure.” Furthermore, Ballmer even went on to say that “Google is bigger” and “Amazon is a little bit smaller.” It is extremely rare to hear such direct figures; in almost two decades, Google and Amazon have never even put a rough figure on their server count — and now Ballmer is on stage, giving up their secrets.
Prior to Ballmer’s keynote speech, the best guesstimate had put Google’s server count at around 900,000 in 2010; so, hearing confirmation that it’s now over one million isn’t a big surprise. We’ve never had any data from Amazon, other than abstract figures, such as the number of objects stored in its cloud. Given the scale of Amazon Web Services (AWS), though, which is by far and away the largest public cloud, close to one million servers is a reasonable figure. What Microsoft is doing with one million servers, though, is anyone’s guess. Azure is no where near the size of AWS, and Bing and Outlook.com are much smaller than Google Search and Gmail. Microsoft has hosted applications such as Office 365 and the servers that power Xbox Live, but still, a million is a stretch.
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