Matthew Botos

I attended a few talks on cloud computing last week, including an overview of Amazon Web Services. My previous view of Amazon’s mission was that they’re out to commoditize everything, from books to products to computing. In fact, they actually do have 3 lines of business:

• Retail site
• Marketplace
• Web services

The extent of their web services is testimony to it’s standing as a main pier of the company: it includes a variety of inexpensive a la carte services for data storage, messaging, and raw computing power. Web service traffic actually surpasses that of the retail site. Of course, the real proof comes in some of their success stories:

• SmugMug stores and serves 700 TB of data through Amazon (case study)
• The New York Times TimesMachine split and completed optical character recognition on 130 years work of newspaper scans in less than 24 hours for a few hundred dollars
• Animoto launched their viral video application on Facebook, and quickly scaled from 50 virtual servers in Amazon’s cloud to 3500

Interestingly, a discussion did form on how low you could go and still fulfill Amazon’s goal of being “profitable at any level of utilization”. With a $72/month minimum for one of their EC2 cloud servers, the consensus was that you had to be the level of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated box already and need the elasticity of the cloud.

For smaller personal blogs and photo galleries, traditional hosting is still more economical, at least for now. I’ve also priced out using it as backup storage, and for personal use, flat-rate “unlimited” servers like Mozy are much cheaper.

Privacy and security also made for interesting discussions. Amazon wipes the virtual machines when you shut them down, and provides https for all services. Plus, you can encrypt your data before sending it, as JungleDisk does for online backups. Even with that, a few people remarked that the liability from anything like payroll and credit card processing would overwhelm any savings. The real potential seems to be in ad-hoc heavy data crunching and cheap, scalable infrastructure for startups - Toby DiPasquale remarked he hasn’t bought a physical server in 5 years!

My own take comes from the perspective of both a corporate software developer and small business owner. I’ve seen the corporate world move to virtualized servers on an abstracted infrastructure, so taking that down to the next level of just-in-time resources is a logical step. I think many companies will shy away from processing on external servers, but may build their own internal clouds.

For small businesses, it’s a definite plus once you get up to the scale where it becomes economical and when the business really starts to grow (I’m not there yet). In that space, it’ll be interesting to see how commodity computing compares with the increasing number of commodity software as a service offerings.