Servers: What type of hardware does Amazon AWS/EC2 use to run virtual machines?

AWS EC2 Instances are run on commodity hardware.  Single power supply, single NIC, etc.  The whole strategy of deploying into the cloud is "expect everything to fail all the time".   It costs the same to run hardware for 10 high power cpu high memory servers with low redundancy as it does to run 2-4 high redundancy boxes (dual power supply, multi-NIC, battery backup on top of generator, etc etc) and since you should be building your application with built in redundancy anyway, you get all of the performance with all of the redundancy on standard commodity hardware.

They run on commodity hardware.  It was largely SGI (Rackable) for most of the original infrastructure.  I believe they have moved to a custom design of their own making for HPC using Quanta for the servers.

Based on the type of instance you choose, it runs on a specific type of physical hardware within their datacenter. Each physical server can host multiple virtual servers (instances in AWS language). Most of their servers run on Intel Xeon type processors. You can find detailed list here : http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-details

Amazon don't generally or directly disclose this but there are hints out there. This re:Invent video is a must watch! - the server design slide is slightly after 18:00) - I'd recommend the whole video actually. Other wider references: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/16/aws_data_centre_architecture_amazon_cto_werner_vogels/?page=2 ... "The C4 instances .... use Intel's Haswell" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/23/amazon_buys_annapurna_labs/ ..."Eventually all of Amazon's hardware will be custom kit built by original design manufacturers (ODMs) "

provided the basic answer for you. All of their servers run on Intel hardware. Amazon may in the future add non-Intel hardware. It might also be worth noting that Amazon builds their own hardware. They previously used a hardware provider to build their servers. This means they do not buy from traditional data center providers such as Dell, HP or IBM. AWS does partner heavily with Intel directly. They also do provide some hardware specific specs for their instance classes on the following page. This will give you the exact processor that runs under the hood. https://aws.amazon.com/intel/ I have not yet seen a full specification of a single hardware node as far as how many sockets and cores they have installed but every EC2 instance can expect to have a neighbor running on the same hardware. You should expect a C4 (Compute Optimized) to have more cores than a D2 (Dense-storage Instances) instance type which both use the same processor class. More on the benefits of the Intel partnership with AWS... https://gigaom.com/2014/11/13/intel-rolls-out-custom-chip-that-powers-amazons-ec2-instances/

The actual hardware that AWS uses is considered proprietary information, but others have pointed out that AWS builds it's own servers, or rather sub contracts to a white box manufacturer.This is a good article:http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-scale-aws/That said, it can be inferred from public documentation that the basic server building blocks are dual socket boxes. Hence an 8xlarge or 10xlarge instance is effectively single tenanted on the hardware at the time of this writing.

You can check the Amazon instance types here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ An EC2 Compute Unit is described here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it Also, take care with CPU stolen times in micro instances: its processing power is not "stable": http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-steal/