Among the various items of interest being expressed in this years AWS re:Invent 2016 - such as the amazing network, storage and server customizations they are building in-house (just wow) - the topic that fascinates me in particular is their long term commitment to achieve 100% usage of renewable energy for their datacenters.

Is this really possible?

James Hamilton - VP and "Distinguished Engineer" at AWS states they are already generating the equivalent of 907 Megawatts, or 2.6MWhr annually at their renewable energy farms.

As he states (paraphrased) "...the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine, but their engineers are taking this all into consideration in assuring the average power delivery."

Here he is showing their current and future planned power generation farms, and respective power outputs:

Overall, AWS claims to be at 45% renewable energy by end of year with a goal of 50% by the end of 2017. They feel confident they have a path to reach 100% at some (unknown) point in the future.

That is really impressive, especially with the horsepower they are churning with numbers like ~300K+ physical servers within each datacenter facility (2-5 of these in each region), and spinning up enough new virtual servers every day to run a Fortune 500 company.

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In other news (I thought this was a JOKE) - they've one-upped their Snowball product. BIGTIME.

AWS unleashed SnowMobile - on stage:

Yes folks, this is for real.

They will show up with an 18 wheeler at your datacenter's backdoor to transfer up to an Exabyte of data from on-prem to cloud. To put that into perspective - that's 1,000,000 terabytes.

And as Andy Jassy - CEO of AWS - claims, you'd be surprised at how many companies have this much data these days.

Bravo AWS.  Keep up the amazing work.

-=E