I was preparing for ETech and ran across Jeff Barr’s recent AWS blog.  He points to a number of interesting links, including WeoCEO’s new website (thanks Jeff!). 

One of the links he points to is David Berlind’s video on “Is it time to throw away your servers?“.  It was a highly entertaining video, but more importantly it clearly laid out the business case for why cluster and grid computer is going to revolutionize this business.  We must be channeling the same psychic hotline, because it mirrors the case I laid out in the Cycles in the Sky blog earlier this week.  (However, David’s is far more entertaining, with real numbers.)

Commodity Computing Cycles (C3) is a paradigm shift in business computing.  It is coming, and to be honest, I have no way to predict the impact of the change on efficiency and productivity in the business computer arena.  I do know that in order for it to achieve its potential, those of us focusing on cluster and grid computing have to deliver some sort of Service Level Agreement (SLA).  While David points to the cost advantages, what he did not point out is the lack of an SLA from Amazon.  Someone running an ecommerce site may willingly pay the additional money shown in David’s video for a traditional data center operation, if they can be assured of up-time and bandwidth.  Without these assurances, the dollar savings obtained by using a C3 solution may be given back in poor user experience or web client customer service.

That being said, I think that we (the greater community of Amazon Web Services and EC2 users) are working towards achieving reasonable service levels upon which we can build ecommerce solutions.  We developed our WeoCEO ISO because it was required in order to host our WeoGeo geospatial exchange on EC2.  There are other service issues, such as large file ingestion (imagine trying to push a terabyte size file up to S3!), but we are confident that these too can be overcome and solutions delivered to the community.  I truly believe that the revolution is here, and like any other paradigm shifts, there will be a tremendous opportunity for those willing to place their stakes in the ground to deliver solutions to those who follow.
 

On other notes, I will be taking my soapbox to ETech next week.  Find me if you would like to chat about such things as revolutions and paradigm shifts in cluster and grid computing, as well as geospatial technologies.