Some people love their automobiles. They can tell you all all about their technical specifications. They buy upgrades and after market parts. Its a lifestyle and a hobby. I am not one of those people. For me an automobile is purely a means to an end. I am here, I want to be there. Having lived the last year without a car (my truck is in storage and will be for sale soon), I can say I don’t much care whether I get there in my car, or a taxi, or a zip car. This is the benefit of modern urban living, I suppose.
So, just as I look at an automobile as a means to an end, I look at servers as a means to an end. I guess that makes me a Software Guy. I know there are Hardware Guys out there. They’re doing great things and I’m thankful for them. But, for the most part, I am interested in what computers can do for us, not how they do it.
I don’t think I’m alone in my attitude. That’s why I think that computing as a commodity a strong future. We can leave things like data center efficiency to someone else and focus on the things that are really important to us. Oh, if you’re at facebook scale, you’re probably going to have to do serious cross stack optimization. And if you are at the hobby end, current cloud offerings may be pricy.
But, consider this. What can you buy with $100,000 per year? One programmer or 120 ec2 instances. (more with reserved instance pricing.)
At a certain scale, cloud computing makes alot of sense. $100,000 is just a number. Oh, I know, you have this guy in Belarus and he works for less. But, the fundamental equation is the same. Programming is expensive and computing power is a commodity. Did I mention I’m a software guy?
Are you interested in how to use PHP in the cloud? Clay Loveless recognized the advantages of cloud computing early, jumping on ec2 as one of the early adaptors. He’s recently written a great Introduction to AWS for PHP Programmers. I’d encourage you to check it out.
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you traffic whore.
what does this has to do with php.
no quality shit!
Unfortunately, for most cloud computing platforms the car analogy you give doesn’t work out.
If you see a car as a means to an end, and all you care about is getting there, then you need an application platform like Google’s AppEngine. Here you just add an app, and the rest is taken care of.
If on the other hand you run ec2, you’re no longer worrying about hardware, but still about instances and virtual servers. All of them run OS’s that need to be maintained; it’s like taking taxi’s but still having to know everything about the taxi’s engines.
I predict that in the future we’ll move towards AppEngine like models or ‘managed clouds’.
I don’t get it. A programmer or 120 EC2 instances? What if I wanted a house?!
First half of your blog I was completely lost much like H up top ^. Then I read your last paragraph and it all seems to make sense. Cheers for the link – I will definitely check it out
seems to be incomplete post
the link you’d provided up there, is very interesting. its incredible to see how a VERY high traffic website scales.
but regarding your post, its looks incomplete and inconsistent. definitely i dont agree with your comparison like “1 programmer or 120+ EC2 instances” because you know if you cant drive the car, it doesn’t make any sense to owe 120+ in your garage. ultimately you need someone who will drive them for you
but good blog post – specially the link worth a visit
If you don’t know how your server runs surely its hard to write efficient code for it?
I’ve been looking to get my head in the clouds for a while now – but I think you have to strike a balance between massive distribution, and good old-fashioned server-load-balancing for certain tasks, just because it is more straightforward and a faster solution
While this is not a perfect analogy I think the idea/thought is sound.