Google, MSN, Yahoo, Amazon. These companies first and foremost are businesses, managing advertising- or e-commerce-driven Web sites.But these mega-Web-companies are also building the next-generation of computing utilities — George Gilder eloquently calls them “information factories.”
Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels opened the door just a bit to Amazon’s cloud factory, publishing a paper describing the massive storage infrastructure underlying Amazon.com (not to be confused with Amazon’s public-storage Web service, S3)
From the paper’s abstract:
Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems.
A massive self-healing application infrastructure is an endlessly fascinating concept to consider. I got wind of the Amazon paper from Nick Carr, author of “Does IT Matter” as well as the upcoming book “The Big Switch,” which looks at next-generation computing architectures as represented by firms like Amazon and Google — and, one would imagine, tier 1 telecom carriers. Carr does a good job of putting Dynamo into context:
At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.
Call it cloud computing or cloud OS or simply the “googleplex” — whatever. It’s an approach to next-generation networks/applications that telcos need to get in tune with as well.
Wow: I stumbled on this info page, quite by accident. I was wondering if I could find information about the large paper fctory that was premade in Japan. When, I found this. Thanks EKD
Despite what many pundits have to say, reliability issues will not be the downfall of cloud computing. Using cloud computing does not mean neglecting to architect solutions that meet their business requirements, including reliability requirements.
I wrote more about this idea here:
Cloud Computing and Reliability
http://faseidl.com/public/item/212584