Internet Cloud
Friday, 14th November, 2008
Move over AJAX as the industry buzzword, Cloud Computing is here.
All the major players are contributing to the future of cloud computer in various ways. Microsoft with Azure, Google with Google App Engine, and Amazon with Amazon Web Services, but I don't believe that people are really giving enough credit to the contributions that Facebook, Yahoo and Apache are playing in the future of server infrastructure.
Thrift, Hardoop, ActiveMQ, CouchDB are all great open source products which provide the software infrastructure to establish your own architecture.
"Hold on", your thinking, "I thought that Cloud Computing incorporates Software as a Service (SaaS)". Ok so the software I mentioned above isn't available as a Software as a Service but that doesn't mean that it isn't going to play an important part in web infrastructure.
The major reasons to use web services infrastructure provided by the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the following;
- Cost Effectiveness
- Dependability
While the only one of the three major players to offer the customizability is Amazon. The other two providers provide you with a defined feature set that your software must adhere too.
The benefits of rolling my own document orientated database (Couchdb) then using that provided by Amazon or Google are the same benefits you get when you adopt any open source software. With the open source solutions above you have the opportunity to customise the software to your projects needs if they don't meet certain criteria.
That doesn't mean that you should not adopt any of the solutions provided by Google, Amazon or Microsoft. All I'm saying is that with these services there comes a cost. My next post will actually be about using one of the services provided by Amazon. Go figure.
