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The two examples I think that matter are Amazon and Microsoft. I don't think they copied Google- I think they independently realized, when they decided to enter the cloud service, that they had to scale up and out their data centers tremendously. And when you do that, you quickly learn that deploying more hosts is easier than deploying the ports to interconnect those hosts with a globally nonblocking fabric.

Amazon and MSFT have both published nice papers showing that they "got it" about 3-5 years ago. I think they operate within an order of magnitude of Google in terms of total external and internal traffic, but that's just a guess because none of these companies publish enough detail to say for sure.



As a googler, I would agree with this bucketing. Amazon and Microsoft are in the same ballpark scale-wise, but companies like LinkedIn and Netflix have lower scaling needs (this isn't a knock on them, just a technical reality). Netflix would likely be in the same ballpark if they didn't leverage Amazon. Facebook is also hovering near the line, and has probably crossed over.




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