At last week’s technology summit in Seattle hosted by OVP Venture Partners, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels explained how Amazon Web services has its head in the clouds – the future of cloud computing that is.
By using cloud resources, a U.S. company can open a new office half way around ther world without having to worry about duplicating IT installations. Paying only for the storage and processing actually used is the most- economic reason for using cloud resources.
One area where cloud computing will emerge as a victor is in non-compouting fields which handle reams of data but lack tech support. “You’re talking about folks who have no idea how to write programs,” said Vogels . “This is where companies like Cloudera will be really successful, in taking these really, really efficient mechanisms, and building on top of those to actually allow psychologists to analyze huge amounts of data.”
Another area is data storage and backup. Vogels expressed how companies “need to solve reliability issues with software” because “data storage hardware will fail.” A failure rate for storage disks of 8-10 percent per year, so a medium-sized data center with, say, 40,000 disks, would need to have a staff member running around replacing about 10 disks a day.
Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, keynoting at this year’s Technology Allliance Luncheon, heralds cloud computing as a golden age. In an on-stage interview with UW professor Ed Lazowska, Ozzie remarked: “Right now the way I’ve been framing things is that, in essence, we are moving to a world of three screens and a cloud. That’s the most succinct way that I can describe it. For the user experience we will all commonly consume solutions immediate to us, whether it’s in media, entertainment consumer or business, that will be delivered to us in something the size of a phone, something the size of a PC, and something the size of a TV. There will be solutions that weave those things together, brought together by cloud on the backend.”
“We have to repivot to think not ‘Is this the specific device?’ but ‘How do you deliver these scenarios across these devices.’ We are rethinking Office. We aren’t conceptualizing Office as a PC product anymore. There are scenarios in the realm of productivity that are very, very appropriate for PC such as viewing a spreadsheet. When you are trying to share something, the Web is a much more appropriate concept in terms of how to share because that’s how people are brought together. They aren’t brought together on the PC; they are brought together on the Web.” [24×7]
