Spouting Shite

Why are cloud computing services proving so popular?

There are many entrants in the web services / cloud computing / utility computing arena, but at this time the market leader is AWS from Amazon.com. Web services are creating a buzz in the web development industry. If you are involved in the web development industry and you are not already using this sort of technology I predict that you will be doing so in the not to distant future.

The reason why these technologies are proving so popular is that they lets businesses and individuals “rent” computing power, data storage, and bandwidth on this vast network, and, best of all, you only pay for what you use.

AWS is gaining quite a bit of traction in the Facebook development area…you might be surprised to hear that several high profile facebook application such as iLike and Family Tree are actually using AWS to serve their users in facebook. These applications use AWS to serve hundreds of thousands of users hits per day. How is that possible?

I believe this is possible due to the following facts:

• The various AWS offerings are very cheap to use and have no up-front costs. This allows you to experiment with the services without major commitments. More importantly, you can test their performance and behavior with simple prototypes before you build your final application.
• Each service offering in the AWS range has a wealth of tools, libraries and code samples that are available for AWS users. Most of these have been written and contributed by the various developers on the forums. There is a large and active community of developers using the infrastructure services, and many of the available resources are open source.
• The low cost allows you to rethink how you design your web applications. Things work differently in the cloud. This can be an advantage as it will allow you to be more ambitious, but at the same time you may have to adjust your expectations to build applications that are robust and massively scalable.
• Design your application to take advantage of the strengths of the AWS…both in service delivery and low cost…this will allow you to spread your application’s workload between many small components rather than centralising it into a single point of failure.
• Embrace the concepts behind cloud computing….build application from components that will quickly recover from transient errors, and that can be easily restarted or replaced if they fail completely.