Riding The River Rapids In A Mesh Jungle
A couple of months ago in A Meshed-up Jungle Is Born, I predicted that “things will happen quickly” when meshes interconnect. Well forget about Web 2.0 or Web x.x for that matter, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is about to open the floodgates on a new era of what I’ve been calling the Mesh Jungle.
For newer, “Web 2.0″ companies, providing APIs to allow third parties to “mash up” data from multiple sources is becoming commonplace.Amazon, however, is offering more than just programmatic access to its product catalog. The e-commerce giant boasts one of the most battle-tested computing infrastructures on the Internet, which it is opening up to outsiders.
“A fundamental premise behind what we are trying to do at Amazon Web Services is provide external developers all the benefits of scale that Amazon enjoys as a large Web site and large consumer and producer of Web infrastructure,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at Amazon Web Services.
Rather than contract with a hosting company, buy hardware and hire staff, a customer could tap Amazon for computing power, storage and other general-purpose computing services.
Selipsky argued that outsiders can tap into the performance, reliability and security that the engineers of Amazon.com created over the years, which includes a total technology investment of more than $1.5 billion.
Amazon’s cloud is part of a suite of Amazon Web Services that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. It is a highly disruptive offering that will lead to a fundamental transformation of web hosting and corporate data centers as we have known them by radically driving costs down.
Carr argues that corporate computing data centers are analogous to private generators, which were used in the early days of electricity. These power sources burned fuel to generate electricity for a single site, such as a department store or a wealthy person’s home. (Tycoon J.P. Morgan was the first residential customer in New York City in the late 1800s.) But private and small-scale power generators, which used direct current, were eventually displaced entirely by alternating current technology, which allowed utilities to send electricity over long distances, obviating the need for a local power plant and the people to run it.
To Carr, today’s corporate data centers are the private power generators of old: inefficient, underutilized and too costly in the face of the network model of delivering IT services.
“As the technology matures and central distribution becomes possible, large-scale utility suppliers arise to displace the private providers. Although companies may take years to abandon their proprietary supply operations and all the sunk costs they represent, the savings offered by utilities eventually become too compelling to resist, even for the largest enterprises. Abandoning the old model becomes a competitive necessity,” Carr wrote.
The above article points out that some object to Carr’s analysis:
Carr downplays the competitive advantage that custom-built software applications can bring, compared to hosted offerings, said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at software maker Iona Technologies.
“Computers do not work without software. And unlike electricity or other raw technology, software is designed for direct human interaction,”
but this is a straw-man because Amazon’s offerings show it’s possible to have solutions that are both custom built and hosted by providing a full layered spectrum of interfaces. Larger solution providers with the need for greater capabilities will follow Amazon’s lead using Sun’s Grid and ultimately IBM’s grid ecosystem will evolve to fill those needs for mega corporations. With zero startup cost and really low $0.10 per cpu-hour(Sun’s grid is $1/cpu-hour), Amazon Web Services, like the PC and web browser before it will carve out the path through the Mesh Jungle.