What is the web and software cloud?
Software and data storage has always evolved, and quite rapidly in technology. From the old punch cards, to disks, to hard drives and now a new type of storage is emerging, the cloud.
Distributed computing based on the internet, the ultimate self-healing network, is now reaching a level where services that provide distributed data storage are thriving. I will give you three areas that these types of services are happening and why you see this area of technology is set for leaps and bounds.
- Media and Digital Asset Storage (who doesn’t use S3 in at least some projects?)
- Software Configuration Management (SCM) Distributed Source Control (Git, Mercurial, etc)
- Personal Data
Media and Digital Asset Storage
Streaming media, online TV, youtube, website media servers are all part of the digital asset storage movement into the software and web cloud.
Amazon S3 is a very commonly used service for this where they charge cents on the GB per data used. This allows only used bandwidth to be charges and a bit of parallelism in your hosting setup. If one part of your hosting (yoru files) are hosted on Amazon S3 then if your site gets slammed with traffic the largest burden is on Amazon’s Servers that can scale. The data and content representation can be driven by your servers and purr like a kitten through a digg or reddit front page.
Software Configuration Management (SCM)
Subversion is popular now and it is the 80% source control system of the day (many thanks to Google Code using it). But a new type of source control management has been in effect in version control systems (VCS) in such source control platforms as
Git and
Mercurial. These non centralized systems are unlike Subversion, CVS, VSS which are centralized system. Centralized systems have benefits to management but also fail the distributed and redundancy issues that might arise without a distributed source control system.
Services like gitorious and github are services in the cloud handling your distributed cloud based source control system so you don’t have to manage either.
Personal Data
Email, documents, spreadsheets, photo storage, videos and many other areas of personal data and life are moving online. Gmail, Google Docs, Zoho, and many others are making online office a reality. Many people switched in 2007 to online office and you can bet that trend will continue. Your documents are safer at google than on your local drives.
Data is no longer stored locally for many things. There are no longer on a specific drive or disk that is physical in your reach. These are stored on a server somewhere, out there. Out there becomes the cloud, one ominous, massive collection of data. The only way to find it is with semantics and authentication to gain access to it. I believe that the cloud will make personal data much more manageable that matches people’s brain. Google keyword searching and semantic uris are two key elements that I think mimic the brains behavior to perform more efficient. Storing your data this way is natural. Have you tried gmail search compared to outlook, see a difference?
And More
These are just briefly some of the technologies to watch and especially when it comes to infrastructure. I think the trend is towards more offsite, redundant, cloud based computing and storage not only for cost savings in maintenance and management but also to allow growth to be in line with visitors or usage. No reason to pay for servers for peak performance all the time. Some services might only have a once a year spike like maybe taxes or the “The Big Game” with the NFL. This way costs can be better defined and growth or spikes just increase the cloud capacity for handling them.
Elastic Computing for instance like Amazon EC2 initiative where server capacity is available on demand with the spike in traffic and expands or contracts based on need.
Amazon is actually quite far ahead in the web services and cloud markets. They have a strong offering and their stock jump in 2007 may have been warranted.
There are many more facets to the software web cloud that is being constructed and used heavily that will be appearing here so stay tuned.
Today Mosso, a cloud provider that runs off of Rackspace and supports lots of languages, launched CloudFS to compete with Amazon S3.
Scalable, dynamic storage. Use as much or little as you want and only pay for what you use.
