Two of the mantra words of the last decade in ICT marketing speak have been and still are ‘scalability’ and ‘agility’. The implicit assumption is that all organisations need and desire and are willing to pay for those attributes in their systems. They also presume business growth, although many leaders quite rightly see them equally as competition and survival tools. The other key point is that these are also what cloud computing delivers while it has by and large fulfilled its complementary promises of on-demand, commodity-style service delivery with better economies than alternative in-house solutions to the same sets of needs.
But as cloud computing has rapidly evolved it has developed its own ecosystem of new architectures and new technologies. The public/private/hybrid cloudscape has segued into a new paradigm in which the distinctions are considerably fuzzier. If a demand surge can push an application from its usual home in a private cloud out to (or indeed up to) a virtual private cloud hosted on a public cloud we are clearly seeing agile scalability in real life.
As larger enterprises see what the Googles and Facebooks are doing — and suppliers look to help them — we are seeing the architectures and the technologies cascading down towards the more traditional enterprises. Not everything will be applicable, but they can choose what is valuable and there are new technology companies and service partners that can provide and assist, Bob McEwan, HP
The fact that the solution matches the demands and the nature of the task rather than the architecture is a direct reflection of the virtualisation that began the revolution. Once the logic is abstracted from the specific hardware stack we have almost infinite possibilities for change and development, provided we can effectively control the change process itself. In a real sense, what we are doing is pushing the computing work higher up the logic stack so that the hardware du jour affects performance, not accomplishment.
Reigning champions
The cloud giants have continued to exemplify this, whether providing their own services directly or hosting the delivery of services from clients. Google and Amazon are the reigning champions but who can say what the picture might look like in a few years’ time, particularly in regard to heavyweight business services as against consumer streams. It is just over a year since Gartner introduced the term Web Scale IT with, quite consciously, no effort to define or refine the term other than as a useful description of the extreme levels of service delivery now being achieved by the top tier cloud services outfits compared to even global corporate enterprises. No matter what the specific service or content, when any outfit can deliver a sustained quality digital service to millions of simultaneous users worldwide it belongs in a different order of computing.
Gartner did point to six elements or indicators of serious web scale computing: industrial data centres, web-oriented architecture, programmable management, agile processes, a collaborative organisational style and a learning culture. The first four are technical but, as would be expected of Gartner, the last two are related to organisation and management because how else would its subscribers think of matching themselves against the exemplars of extreme service level delivery?
But another important insight is that there is no reason in logical or business terms why the types of systems that can deliver extreme service levels at web scale cannot be valuably employed at a regional, national or even enterprise scale. Speed and performance are equally involved in that service delivery. Our increasing use of and even dependence on smart analytics suggests at least one application area where the technology of web scale IT could be transformative. Gartner went so far earlier this year as to forecast that web scale IT will be at least an architectural approach to be found in 50% of global enterprises as early as 2017.
Hopes for growth
At the same time, the sheer scale of extreme scale web services is still mind-blowing, even as it ramps up geometrically. Rob Easton, a HP and VMware veteran who now runs the Google cloud business for Ireland and the UK, pointed to the traditional hope and fear when a developer takes a new service or product to market: “You hope it will grow like no one has ever seen before, and we have seen quite a few take off like that. But it could also collapse in the first few days or weeks, quite possibly because it cannot respond to demand, and you’ve lost a business. Snapchat is one of our clients and just a great example of scalability matching success. It is now handling upwards of 450 million photos every day and still growing.”
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