One thing that's clear as we pass the halfway point of 2010 is that the Cloud Computing movement is not only gaining momentum, but the usage trends of the Web that are driving Cloud Computing are only increasing in influence and contributing to its momentum at a faster pace than ever.
For example, Facebook's Chief Technical Officer reported last month that they were seeing as many as one million photos being served up per second through the entirety of their Web-based social application, and that they expect this to increase ten-fold over the next twelve months.
Also, how many of us watched some streaming World Cup soccer games over the past month as Spain proved supreme in South Africa? Or at least highlights on YouTube and various other video outlets? Currently, it is estimated that 50% of all Web traffic is video. That's not surprising, but with High Definition (HD) Web technology and the like emerging, video is expected to represent 90% of all traffic in just a few years. This is going to require bandwidth levels that were largely unthinkable years ago.
On another front, mobile infrastructure is not keeping pace with demand. Right now, some estimates have shown mobile infrastructure requirements growing at about 50% per year, while actual mobile network infrastructure capacity is only growing at 20% per year. This is going to be a real problem, and one of the reasons some mobile carriers such as AT&T have begun capping usage and introducing fees for premium levels of bandwidth that were standard issue up until now, and other carriers may likely follow suit. It's the only way to help curtail demand to meet capacity in their eyes.
So what does all of this mean?
One of the reasons we have Cloud Computing in the first place is that innovative Web companies such as Amazon and Google had to build out enough computing capacity to handle peak periods of Web traffic and activity, especially Amazon during its Christmas holiday crunch.
As a result, they found themselves not only experts at building out distributed computing capacity, load-balancing, and data synchronization, but also found that most of the time they had all sorts of computing power that they had invested in for peak periods "shelved" and not in use, far from cost-optimized. This led them to think of ways to monetize this excess capacity (servers and disk space lying around idle) and led to some of the early thinking and innovation around Web-based centralized computing. The same is true with Google and others with all of their excess Web computing power, as they looked for ways to monetize large, excess amounts of capacity and leverage their expertise at building out server farms and developing highly-distributed, yet high performing levels of computing.
This same necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention phenomenon is playing out now as Facebook develops new technology to serve up its millions of photos per second, and is spawning new data storage and retrieval technology such as the NoSQL paradigm shift, with new non-SQL and "not only" SQL architecture approaches such as Cassandra, BigTable, Neptune, Google Fusion Tables, and Dynamo that are more finely tuned to the needs of Web-scale Cloud Computing.
In parallel, the bandwidth demands of video and mobile infrastructure are seeding new innovation around capacity and distribution of bandwidth as well, including much more efficient and easier to implement elastic computing capabilities to handle these variable bandwidth demands as much of mobile's required computing requirements are moved to and answered via the Web (and this also makes SmartPhones ideal Cloud Computing clients, also pushing the paradigm).
While not only mind-boggling and exciting, these trends are the cornerstones of a revolution already in progress. All of this demand-driven innovation is only causing more and more build-out of the foundation from which the future Internet and "Cloud" will emerge. A few years from now, we will look back and see how the Web computing demands of today, whether from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or others, enabled a whole new generation of Web applications to emerge. And of course, huge amounts of data were gobbled up in the process, a lot of which will have come from StrikeIron's own data delivery innovation in the Cloud.
No doubt about it, the Cloud is a good place to be.
For example, Facebook's Chief Technical Officer reported last month that they were seeing as many as one million photos being served up per second through the entirety of their Web-based social application, and that they expect this to increase ten-fold over the next twelve months.
Also, how many of us watched some streaming World Cup soccer games over the past month as Spain proved supreme in South Africa? Or at least highlights on YouTube and various other video outlets? Currently, it is estimated that 50% of all Web traffic is video. That's not surprising, but with High Definition (HD) Web technology and the like emerging, video is expected to represent 90% of all traffic in just a few years. This is going to require bandwidth levels that were largely unthinkable years ago.
On another front, mobile infrastructure is not keeping pace with demand. Right now, some estimates have shown mobile infrastructure requirements growing at about 50% per year, while actual mobile network infrastructure capacity is only growing at 20% per year. This is going to be a real problem, and one of the reasons some mobile carriers such as AT&T have begun capping usage and introducing fees for premium levels of bandwidth that were standard issue up until now, and other carriers may likely follow suit. It's the only way to help curtail demand to meet capacity in their eyes.
So what does all of this mean?
One of the reasons we have Cloud Computing in the first place is that innovative Web companies such as Amazon and Google had to build out enough computing capacity to handle peak periods of Web traffic and activity, especially Amazon during its Christmas holiday crunch.
As a result, they found themselves not only experts at building out distributed computing capacity, load-balancing, and data synchronization, but also found that most of the time they had all sorts of computing power that they had invested in for peak periods "shelved" and not in use, far from cost-optimized. This led them to think of ways to monetize this excess capacity (servers and disk space lying around idle) and led to some of the early thinking and innovation around Web-based centralized computing. The same is true with Google and others with all of their excess Web computing power, as they looked for ways to monetize large, excess amounts of capacity and leverage their expertise at building out server farms and developing highly-distributed, yet high performing levels of computing.
This same necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention phenomenon is playing out now as Facebook develops new technology to serve up its millions of photos per second, and is spawning new data storage and retrieval technology such as the NoSQL paradigm shift, with new non-SQL and "not only" SQL architecture approaches such as Cassandra, BigTable, Neptune, Google Fusion Tables, and Dynamo that are more finely tuned to the needs of Web-scale Cloud Computing.
In parallel, the bandwidth demands of video and mobile infrastructure are seeding new innovation around capacity and distribution of bandwidth as well, including much more efficient and easier to implement elastic computing capabilities to handle these variable bandwidth demands as much of mobile's required computing requirements are moved to and answered via the Web (and this also makes SmartPhones ideal Cloud Computing clients, also pushing the paradigm).
While not only mind-boggling and exciting, these trends are the cornerstones of a revolution already in progress. All of this demand-driven innovation is only causing more and more build-out of the foundation from which the future Internet and "Cloud" will emerge. A few years from now, we will look back and see how the Web computing demands of today, whether from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or others, enabled a whole new generation of Web applications to emerge. And of course, huge amounts of data were gobbled up in the process, a lot of which will have come from StrikeIron's own data delivery innovation in the Cloud.
No doubt about it, the Cloud is a good place to be.
I beg to differ. I think it is in a state of growth. The fact that people don't want their information to reside outside of a firewall, has upped the demand for private clouds.
Posted by: records management | December 27, 2010 at 06:41 AM