Comments on: Hosting Apocalypse

By: Competing in a Commodity Hosting Market | LayerBlog

Competing in a Commodity Hosting Market | LayerBlog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:09:25 +0000

[...] in a Commodity Hosting Market We knew it was going to happen but perhaps not so soon. Today Amazon announced that it would be reducing it’s pricing on EC2 [...]

By: Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:53:27 +0000

Thanks for the information. Big news in Australia for cloud computing is Telstra have just announced a $500m investment into cloud services. Great news for the local industry.

By: James Byers

James Byers — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:16:02 +0000

“That’s roughly 3 times the number of servers that Google has.”

Google has long downplayed their server count (tens of thousands is the typical public statement since the early 2000s), and 100,000 does not jive with either their capital expenditure over the last year or many published estimates over the last few years. I’d guess that number is substantially larger.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955184-7.html
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/a_question_for.php

By: Thom Allen

Thom Allen — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:38:15 +0000

Honestly, people are going to see names like Amazon, IBM and Google, and assume stability and reliability. These companies have a solid brand. If they make their cloud services affordable for the average users, and makes the management tools easy to use, it only makes sense the current state of hosting will change.

By: Walmart Computing - Understanding Utility Computing and Economies of Scale | trevoro.ca | blog

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:17:53 +0000

[...] Walmart computing is the new term I’m inventing to describe what happens when the Utility Computing or one aspect of the Cloud computing movement makes it bigtime. The idea is simple enough. As more companies access virtual resources instead of real, physical servers then that will result in a reordering of the infrastructure. That reordering will also imply massive cost changes, like I’ve written about before over at LayerBoom. [...]

By: Jon Hancock

Jon Hancock — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:45:24 +0000

1 – Windows Server is not used much in any open Internet context. Even if you look at using this for in-house, using Microsoft’s cloud to run your windows clients from 1000 miles away will always have bandwidth hiccups. i.e. “GUI replication doesn’t belong in the cloud”
2 – This article assumes only the U.S. Maybe EU where Amazon also has hosting. There are severe restrictions for hosting in other countries, like China, where growth is high and this type of models won’t work due to gov restrictions.

By: Matthew Hall

Matthew Hall — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:12:08 +0000

If Microsoft’s option is Windows only(which im fairly certain it will be, that’s how they roll) then Amazon is going to have absolutely no competition. No one cares about Windows Server OS. Linux is where its at.

By: Will your next web host be in the cloud? | Internet Life | A View from the Isle

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:50:50 +0000

[...] Behan passed around this link from Trevor this morning—Hosting Apocalypse | LayerBoom Networks—which has the gist that was cloud computing centres like Amazon’s EC2 and Google Apps engine [...]

By: The future is cloudy | Bootup Labs Blog

The future is cloudy | Bootup Labs Blog — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:26:18 +0000

[...] that end, I completely agree with his most recent post on the future of the hosting industry: Hosting Apocalypse. Yep, that does deserve a drumroll and an explosion. I could go into all sorts of Gutenberg [...]

By: Jim Pick

Jim Pick — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:25:59 +0000

I’ve been playing around with some interesting very experimental “cloud” technologies as of late.

What has become clear in my mind is that there is a very clear delineation between the specification/development of a service, and the process of actually deploying/instantiating it.

Historically, you were tied to your infrastructure, and you had to develop with that in mind. Now, that just isn’t the case. It’s now possible to develop your app with any number of frameworks, and be able to deploy that app with any number of hosting providers with extremely little effort to switch.

The overall cost of the physical hosting of apps will trend towards zero — or at least be a very small percentage of the monthly cost of a service. So there will be a proliferation of cheap “feature-as-a-service”, or “compact utility” style services targetted at developers. Those developers will be able to cobble together a bunch of these smaller “cloud” services into a more complete “value-add” implementation for a consumer-facing service.

In terms of “buy vs. build”, things are definitely shifting towards the “buy” direction. Developers will need to become experts in picking economical services that are also going to stick around for a long time. These types of services can safely be built into the lower levels of their infrastructure stacks.

I think there’s a role for free / open source software to play here. Developers will be specifying and “buying” services to underlay their apps. A good strategy here would be to stick to “buying” only those fine-grained services that could easily be replicated with some free software and additional effort if the need arises.

The most successful cloud infrastructure providers will be the ones that can support the broadest range of services in one place (co-location). Right now, AWS is a good example of this (eg. EC2, S3, SimpleDB, SQS, etc.). Some of the large players, such as Microsoft and Google, may not fare so well here, especially if they build preferences and biases into their clouds in order to favour their proprietary services over those of others.