For entrepreneurs, the web is like a sky full of possibilites. With very little investment they can go to their basement, code every night for two weeks and come out with the next Facebook.
But guess what happens if their little project gets picked up by a major blog like Slashdot or ReadWriteWeb. The site’s shared-hosting server gets pounded by millions of requests, and all of a sudden there’s a huge problem: They need money to buy more servers and a cabinet in an expensive datacenter.
And what if the traffic was temporary and the site went back to the 100 loyal users it had before? The entrepreneur is left with a pile of useless servers and a 12 month hosting contract.
Amazon saw an opportunity to solve this very problem. They had already built an incredibly reliable framework capable of managing thousands of users. Why not share these resources with other companies, charging based on usage?
Enter cloud computing for the masses.
What is cloud computing?
Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “a style of computing allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (“in the cloud”) without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them”.
In the early days of the industrial era, factories used to have electric generators to generate the power for their machinery. Electricity wasn’t a commodity, but part of the capital investment. Today, nobody thinks about this part of the process equation, you just plug your machine to the outlet on the wall and off you go.
Cloud computing is exactly the same; it allows the entrepreneur to focus on building the website’s code (or software) and leaves the server infrastructure (or hardware) to an external provider. In this scenario, the entrepreneur only pays for the resources he uses, and they can scale according to his needs.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon offers various web services that allow a web application designer to build a site with nothing but software.
One of them is Amazon Simple Storage Service (or S3), which basically allows an application to put and fetch data without worrying about limits. The system stores these files as objects with an assigned index that can be made to mimic a directory structure with several levels. It’s like having an unlimited hard drive. For example, the site for the Indianapolis 500 stores more than a 100,000 photos in S3, and as you can imagine, they don’t have to worry about adding hard drives or running out of space.
Another cloud service is Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (or EC2). Imagine that you could rent servers by the minute, and that it only requires minutes to have them delivered. EC2 can create any type of server based on profiles; for example a web server, an application server or a database server. Each one can have different memory, processor speed and other properties. You can create any number of them if you’re having a spike of traffic and then destroy half of them the next day when the traffic dies down.
There are other services that you can check out on Amazon AWS site.
It takes a little planning
Even though it sounds like it’s easier than ever to just build a site, there are some application planning necessary when your application will be built with these type of resources, mainly around the database structures. It’s better if your tables are built in segments, so that you can scale the database by storing its information across several servers.
And of course, your application has to follow the common sense of any other website; a great UI, good content and easy to use. But at least, you don’t need to worry about the datacenter anymore.
Adoption
Amazingly of all the web devs and sysadmins I know, none of them are using AWS yet. I’m leading an effort to build an alternate server environment for ExpoTV for disaster recovery purposes, but I can see more and more people discovering this wonderful service as more sites start to use them.
Conclusion
This is a business that Google, AOL or Yahoo could have competed in, but for some reason they didn’t see this as an opportunity for additional revenue.
AWS is already powering a large segment of the web, but of course we can’t tell easily, as these services are working in the background and anonymously. Last July, their storage service had a massive replication issue, and for the first time users saw a lot of their favorite sites malfunctioning, from Twitter to Smumug. But these outages have been few and Amazon now has 24/7 status reporting online.
Personally I don’t think Amazon has been given enough credit for creating what I think is a lifeline support for entrepreneurs wanting to have unlimited scalability without having to draw huge amounts of capital for infrastructure.
{ 0 comments }
