Comments on: For an Amazon Web Services Clone

By: Bob Brauer

Bob Brauer — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:28:43 +0000

The nice thing about outsourcing and sharing technology resources is that if Amazon, Salesforce.com, StrikeIron, or any of these SaaS providers go down, immediately hundreds if not thousands of users will be all over it (these users effectively become real-time system monitors), so the incentive to not go down is incredibly high, and if there is an outage, notification and acknowledgement is instantaneous, and a team of specialists immediately deployed. Over the long haul this will prove to optimize uptime much better than any one company could do on its own, without incredible resource expenditure.

In other words, it’s nice to have your neighbors call the phone company and get the problem resolved if your whole street has lost service, probably before you even notice. The open-source concept is interesting of course, but whose throat do you choke, and who would kick into action should shared resources be down?

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:09:20 +0000

Francis,

I agree with you, the pendulum is swinging back…

Best regards
-Ismael

By: Francis Ip

Francis Ip — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 06:56:25 +0000

Ismael,

It is very interesting that you come to the conclusion that no single point of failure (i.e. Non-Stop) is important. Grid computing, augmented by SOA, is a solution that truly satisfies the original requirements of the APARNET (now Internet). Packet-switching networks provide alternative paths to send data over the network without a fixed route. Workloads can be distributed among computers based on available capacities, regardless of models or operating systems, on the network.

I believe that it makes more sense to use one’s own computing facilities for the normal operations, and subscribe to Amazon-like services as a remote disaster recovery site. This provides business continuity if the primary site is down for a long duration, or cannot be recovered other than by building a new one from scratch. In essence, this is a good alternative, and cheaper than subscribing to hot or even cold backup sites.

Your vision will work when every organization, regardless of size, goes for 100% outsourcing. Nevertheless, many organizations regret that they lose the institutional knowledge after they outsource more than they should! I know of 3 clients that outsourced some of their production work, not just IT, in the early- and mid-1980s. They brought them back in-house when error rates became unacceptably high, or costs escalated exponentially after the intial contract expired!

Outsourcing is not new, it has been around for more than 20 years. Software as a Service (SaaS) is not new either, it is equivalent to the time-sharing service bureaus that we had back in the 60’s and 70’s, when hardware and software were expensive. It looks like we are recycling the same business models every now and then, with new names and technologies.

Cheers!
-Francis