Computing Power: The Drive to Re-Invent

The perpetual drive to “SaaS Enable” applications, launch cloud ready computing platforms and create new and exiting ways of consuming content, anytime any place attracts myriad of professionals and users to the technology industry.

There are many magical applications out there which can truly transform businesses and the way we work; I am lucky enough to be able to work with some of these emerging application platforms and I can tell you that the future looks bright indeed. You only have to look at something like Microsoft Surface, and the community of developers that has emerged to create amazing and rich applications, to realise that pace of change is very swift.

For all of this innovation, however, sooner or later, you have to look at the technology that actually powers the cloud and how it is provided. Sure, the servers, storage and network that provide the underlying platform may not be perceived as exciting in the way that life changing applications are, but they are the fundamental building blocks of the system without which, we could not even contemplate delivering these applications.

At the Data centre level, the servers are the engine room of the cloud, and like all other cloud technologies, are undergoing a period of significant change. Although this change is happening without much fanfare, there is a fundamental shift towards a new way of consuming infrastructure on which to design and develop your applications and platforms.

The hosting industry has become incredibly mature in the UK, with many large providers operating extremely slick sales and marketing engines. There have been many innovations in terms of control panels, scripting support and applications. Yet, the hosting industry seems to have adopted its own Moores law, where one provider ups the storage space and drops the price and the rest follow suit. Not only is this a sure fire way to evaporate any true value in a proposition, but it is has the potential to hold back an entire community of developers who are writing next generation applications.

To illustrate the point, if you were to dig out the very first edition of this magazine and peruse the hosting adverts, you would find that the underlying service is exactly the same today; the only thing that has changed is the price and the amount of webspace, email accounts and domains. Effectively the industry is entrenched in selling Servers rather than services.

This has to, and is going to change. Sitting along side your traditional server based hosting proposition, we are now seeing the emergence of function based hosting; to explain this, I will share a scenario with you. In 95% of conversations that I have, when a customer sketches out a hosting environment on a scrap of paper or whiteboard it will involve a series of shapes, labelled as “Web”, “SQL”, “App”, “Exchange” as opposed to labels that read “Dell/Sun/HP xxx”. Consumers of hosting describe their architectures in terms of function, and the industry generally responds by offering them a box of components. Function based hosting will build the foundations for true infrastructure as a service offerings to emerge as a perfect match for next generation applications.

By providing function based hosting as a service; the industry will provide developers with a way to scale that particular service u-p or down as and when required bringing an end to paying for under utilised server power and paving the way to easily deal with service spikes in an affordable way.

In the very near future these offerings will become commonplace; if you choose to, you will be able to simply pick and mix these functions and a base level of computing power, then consume additional resource or deploy new infrastructure with the simple click of a mouse.

Although it may not be grabbing the major IT headlines, the evolution of infrastructure hosting is happening as we speak, and will change the nature of the conversations that Web Designers and Developers have with both their customers and their hosting providers.