Early examples of innovations on top of Cloud platform emerge
By Tarry Singh at 19 June, 2009, 3:40 am
As I’ve said previously that innovative solutions are coming. They will capture the imagination of masses. So if we are building the cloud, we are simply laying the foundations for the future by pre-announcing the tombstones of some of the industry we are today seeing aggressive contraction and mad M&A activity.
So you are in the dying/increasingly commoditizing [read: going damn cheap!] business if you are in:
- proprietary hardware stuff and offering closed solutions [HW, Networking, Storage]
- proprietary SW [OS, Desktop bound applications etc] - As development move towards the clouds we’ll see more and more SitApps [RIA/RWA] that would be build to get resilient and less and less HW dependent
This is really cool and tells us that admins, developers and even consumers/vendors/suppliers must focus their attention on newer technologies and focus on tools/languages and toolkits that address the Globally deliverable LSAs or Large Scale Applications. Laying focus on development and management around these technologies where a cloud will be a mere facilitator.
Understanding and building the True Cloud might help us all create an eco-system where rules will be defined before you start playing. Everyone puts in their bit and everyone plays fairly. Something financial industry might have greatly benefited from. But do be warned that the “Cloud Ponzi Schemes” emanating out of some private clouds will bind you to contracts that might make it more impossible to get out than previously. The ones that are busy tying up the infrastructure knots with expensive and inflexible architectures will find themselves dead in the water. So you’ve been warned.
As I also said previously: Clouds and Cloud users don’t care and won’t care either. Examples of such start-ups says enough.
Anyways this is refreshing to hear:
Turning to the Amazon event, four Amazon customers presented and discussed their use of cloud computing (my discussion of the following is from notes and memory, as the slides are not yet available). One company was ShareThis, which allows people to share interesting content with friends and colleagues. ShareThis keeps track of all the share events (one might think of these as transactions - Person A shares Content X with Person B, there’s three data elements to keep track of and aggregate for statistics). The numbers of events ShareThis has in its data store is mind-boggling; it uses Amazon SimpleDB to track all of them.
The second company was really interesting - Pathwork Diagnostics, a biotech firm that uses Amazon to evaluate oncology diagnostics. The presenter said that they run large Hadoop-based queries on 240 Amazon EC2 instances for a couple of days, and then shut them down. This is another instance of big data that could not be easily processed in traditional fashion.
Next up was SmugMug, which offers a photo upload and sharing service. Another big data story, but with a twist. SmugMug’s data challenge is not a searching issue; rather it is a physical capacity issue. Digital photos aren’t necessarily that large, but in the quantities that SmugMug deals with, total storage requirements are immense. SmugMug relies on Amazon’s S3 service for storage. The presenter, a former data center ops guy, was asked if he didn’t miss having his own equipment. He seemed to sigh for a moment, reminiscing (it appeared to me) about the good old days of racks of equipment, then quickly shuddered when he thought about how much equipment would be necessary. He also made mention of the fact that, as a self-funded company, investing in large amounts of equipment would be cost-prohibitive.
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