Enterprise level mashups
We are seriously considering offloading some of our data storage and hosting needs to Amazon Web Services, and if that works out - it most certainly will - we 'll offload some more and take it from there.
Amazon has quietly been building a google-grade, highly scalable, reliable and distributed in nature infrastructure, while most folks would disregarding it as an e-tailer. The largest e-tailer, but 'just' an e-tailer nevertheless. They were wrong. Bezos is not to be taken lightly.
Secure Storage Service(S3) is the AWS's flagship service. In short, it allows for 'unlimited' data storage and access of arbitrary data objects ( AKA files ) consolidated into buckets ( psudo-directories ). Its trivial to access the service via its XML (REST and SOAP ) based API. Its super-cheap ( especially if you happen to be dealing with the kind of price tags ISPs in Greece attach to their related offerings ) and, how about that, it works.
It's been suggested before and it gets more obvious by the day. With a very little sum of money, lots of will and dedication and, preferably, with a good idea to ago along, a bunch of guys can build the next Youtube. Delegate the storage and hosting to AWS, setup a few servers ( you can 'hire' virtual servers on AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud for 10 cents / hour ) to do your bidding, use blogs for free ( and highly effective ) PR, and hey-presto, money and fame are pouring in.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and an ever increasing companies are offering similar services ( software as a service, where did I here that before ) which you can bring in together, mash-them-up and you are set. Scalability, distribution and reliability is implicitly guaranteed by the service providers. We are entering this business sooner or later. All our services ( we love modules and components here ) have been designed to be accessible via XML (XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, JSON etc) . Also, we are big on clusters and fault tolerant systems so just about everything is already in place. In fact, everything has been in place for over 5 or so years, since we switched to the new architecture model.
We live in interesting times. Interesting things happen all the time. Go ahead, build the next big thing and contribute to that interest factor. Trust me, you are going to have a whole lot of fun doing it.
Published at Saturday, 16 June 2007 6:52 pm
