In the past, any such service would in practical terms have been limited to just one initial geography and grow from there. “With Snapchat and other online applications today you are talking massive global scale and multiple geographies simultaneously,” said Easton. “Google cloud is hosting another new app Secret.ly which enables people to share photos and other content privately and we see this emulating the rapid growth surge of Snapchat and others. But the key point is that these success phenomena are only possible because of what our web scale services today can deliver.
We would certainly argue also that most of what web scale is about is not about size. It’s about speed and economics and fractional consumption and simplicity in management. So it’s about web scale at any scale, Howard Ting, Nutanix
“When a developer comes up with a viable idea they don’t want to be worrying about how many CPUs or memory or what platform performance is needed. Let them get on with making the app excellent and let Google worry about the delivery and the rest of it. From our side, we have the automation to spin up thousands of virtual machines in immediate response to the demand and wherever in the world it comes from. That’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in proven daily use. From the business point of view, it is charged as the business needs it, not as the IT investment might demand — which in our case is over $2 billion (€1.46 billion) every quarter.” But Easton emphasises that Google does not just design and make huge numbers of servers: “We make specific servers for that enormous scale and we have been developing data centres for 15 years on a scale that was never seen before.”
Post-cloud architecture
Despite the rather obvious fact that web scale computing is currently the prerogative of cloud service companies, many ICT leaders are beginning to see it as a post-cloud architecture, or at least the precursor of that next generation. Bob McEwan was chief technologist and enterprise group consulting manager of HP EMEA until he started a new role in May leading presales and support across Europe. “Those cloud companies have learned how to manage hundreds of thousands if not millions of servers while current practices in the enterprise just do not work at that scale. The management tools are too slow and too complex. We need tools that are faster, simpler and above all more automated.
“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.”
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