Flat Worlds and Clouds

I’ve commented previously on the notion that web technologies are radically reducing the level of ambiguity that we once had to live with. Google, Wikipedia, IMDB and news archives have all replaced vague recollection with fast fact discovery. Only the efficient linking of knowledge technologies into our lives remains a problem for standards and standardization.

Another area that has rapidly advanced and structurally changed the way of doing business is the growth of cheap computing power and even cheaper software to tackle web and enterprise software challenges. Open source software in the form of MySQL and Linux effectively demolished the barriers to building web-grade technology stacks. Ten years ago, expensive Sun server farms and Oracle licenses were a prerequisite to doing business on the web, but now we can do it comparatively cheaply.

Still, there remained until recently one final barrier for large-scale web businesses: scaling from thousands to millions of users with huge bandwidth and content needs. That is changing too, though, with cloud computing efforts like Amazon’s EC2 and related projects. I’ve just embarked on a brand new effort that has the potential to reach huge audiences and am seriously looking at the Amazon model because it means that I no longer have to deal with racks of hardware and complex and expensive colocation plans.

In the cloud computing universe, you buy as much as you need and can buy more as your demand levels rise without having long hardware deployment and software imaging cycles. And thanks to the massive server farms, the capacity comes with certain guarantees concerning reliability. A remarkable feature of cloud computing is the ability to snapshot a given virtual computing instance and create new copies as needed to expand capacity.

The end result, though, is that the combination of cloud computing and open source software has flattened the world of technology to the point where creating world-class web technologies is purely a matter of brainpower and business models.