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This isn't really the point of his article, but I have to both say that I am jealous, and to point you to Dan Farber's tantalizing glimpse of Nick Carr's upcoming book.
Oh, yeah, 3Tera looks moderately interesting, too. But, interesting as the concept is, hasn't Google already done it? I'm feeling deja vu all over again this week, in between this missive, and Monday's blast from the Microsoft past I am wondering how much there really is to be excited about. If these concepts were such sure fire hits, wouldn't the corporate megaliths behind them be rolling them out and profiting by them already? Or do people think that business culture at those larger companies has gotten in the way?
I'm not trying to call anyone out on this stuff, I'm just genuinely curious why that conversation isn't happening. I may well be missing something, but even a quick fill-in on what that is would be helpful.
>>> ” . . . hasn’t Google already done it?”
Yes, Google’s done it. In fact, they consider their operations systems part of their core competence and are very tight lipped about it.
What we at 3tera are doing is offering that same capability to everyone who operates an online service. The folks who spend their days (and nights) actually operating the services we’ve all come to depend on find that prospect very exciting.
Thanks, Bert. I’m not minimizing 3tera’s contribution, or questioning the concept–but I am genuinely curious why Google isn’t leveraging that capability in the same way that 3tera hopes to. Understandably, that’s a question for Google, not you.
This isn’t a unique phenomenon.
Lots of folks built operating systems before Microsoft and Linus, but most of them were large companies selling computers and saw the OS as a tool rather than a product. As such, they built something specific to that task. More recently, the big players didn’t jump into virtualization until VMware had proven the market because at the time they’d rather you just bought another server and/or another license.
Back to utility computing, consider Amazon’s EC2. They’ve been pretty open about the fact that it was built to run Amazon and that’s evident in it’s feature set. If you started building a commercial utility computing system from scratch you’d probably consider it a given that it must run databases, have predictable performance, and allow installing code directly on the system – but EC2 provides none of these. I’m not trying to disparage Amazon, I think they’ve done a pretty good job, but if you read their forums you’ll see their customers have been asking these questions since the service first came out more than a year ago.
More advanced requirements would never be needed, or even desired, by larger players. For instance we work with multiple hosting providers in several countries to give users a choice of data centers. To make it possible to use multiple providers or even switch, AppLogic allows full portability of applications (no matter how complex) with a single command.
Thank you again for the additional comments… I think the topic deserves it’s own post, actually, so I’ll be following up in that.