Into the clouds
Posted by Giles Cambray on 18 April 2008
There have been a couple of big announcements this week that probably aren't getting the attention they deserve, especially when you consider the paradigm shift that they actually represent.
Last weekend Google announced AppEngine, a mixture of a full-stack web development framework and hosting services to run AppEngine apps on. Although initially only supporting the (so hot right now!) Python language, Google have stated their intention to include other languages in the future.
This was followed by Amazon, who announced two significant additions to their EC2 elastic cloud computing service. Firstly they revealed the soon to be released feature of persistent storage of their EC2 service. Secondly, they announced professional support services to go alongside the EC2 service. This comes after the recent news that they now allow for static IP addresses to be assigned to their EC2 instances.
For those of you that read the last two paragraphs and now have absolutely no idea what I am waffling on about (well done for making it this far!), it can be boiled down to the three stages of hosting web sites.
Stage 1 (circa the mid to late 1990s) was real DIY stuff. If you wanted to put a web server online it generally meant selecting the hardware, procuring it, installing whatever operating system and application servers onto the box, driving it to the data centre, racking it, plugging it all in and then praying that the hard disks didn't explode in 6 months time. Life was painful.
During stage 2 (to the present day) things became more service oriented. If you wanted a server you gave a hosting company a call, told them what you wanted and a couple of days later they gave you the access details of the server. If the hard disk exploded you phoned the hosting company and they put a new one in straight away. Life was better.
In stage 3 (from this week onwards) things are getting really smart. The key difference between stage 2 and 3 is simply this: The server in stage 2 exists physically somewhere in a data center. You could locate it in the data center, pull the power cables out and your website would stop responding. In stage 3, you would be very hard pressed to even be able to find the server that your website is running on. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find out what country the server is located in. This is all made possible through technology known as virtualisation. If the hard disk fails, your website still responds. If there is a problem discovered in the server that is running your site, it hands over control of the site to another server and alerts a technician that it is unwell.
Think of stage 1 as owning a car before car manufacturers thought of selling after sales service, stage 2 as renting a car that is serviced by roadside assistance, and stage 3 as taking a cab.
Now think about the cost implications of all 3 stages. Buying a car, renting a car and taking a cab. Now think about the speed that you can alter your business offering depending on these three stages.
Welcome to cloud computing.