I’m currently working on setting up Wowza on an EC2 “Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large” instance (or as I’ve heard it called, the “super-duper-quadruple”, which sounds like something I’d get at Five Guys). There’s no pre-built AMI for this one, so you have to use a stock Linux image (I use the standard Amazon one) and install Wowza with a subscription license, and do the tuning yourself. But the payoff is this: for $1.30 an hour, you get a streaming server capable of delivering 10Gbps of data.  On a 750Kbps stream, that’s over 13,000 concurrent clients. This for about the same cost as nine or ten m1.small instances which can deliver an aggregate of about 1.5Gbps. On a reserved instance, you can get this down to just under 75 cents an hour.

In addition to Ludicrous Speed on the network I/O, this instance comes with 8 multithreaded Xeon 5570 cores (at 2.97GHz), 23 GB of RAM, and 1.7TB of local storage. (a quick speed test downloaded a half-gigabyte file in about four seconds, limited by the gigabit interface at the remote server). This is roughly equivalent to a moderately configured Dell R710. There’s also a GPU-enabled version of this that adds a pair of nVidia Tesla GPU cores.

If that’s not enough, you can go bigger, with 16 cores, 60GB of memory, and 3.5TB, Recently, someone clustered just over a thousand of these instances into the 42nd largest supercomputer in the world.

As of right now, these monster instances are only available in the us-east-1 zone.