The Microsoft & MBM Commercial event really surprised me on Wednesday. And no, it was not just the lack of canapes that caught my attention. The gorgeous Microsoft office, the sociable attendees, and the entertaining presentation offered a new perspective: cloud computing isn’t dull! There was a lot I took away, but I’ll run through the basics of clouds and data centres so you can sound knowledgeable next time a conversation arises.
You can easily get as many definitions of ‘cloud computing’ as there are techies in the room, but I liked this explanation offered:
a) Data is stored somewhere
b) Computing power is stored somewhere
c) Pay for it as you go
(Note: The internet is not the cloud. The internet gets the cloud to and from your laptop or mobile phone)
So, how is this new? Back in the day, people used to arrange a time share schedule with other departments or other offices for a physical machine with computing power. Now ‘cloud computing’ is the same concept, but instead using the internet to connect us to it.
It’s all a bit airy fairy, but felt more tangible with an explanation of Linked-In. When you meticulously fill in your profile details and divulge every job responsibility you’ve ever managed, where is that data stored? In the cloud, more specifically in a cloud located half an hour from my university in the states – Elk Grove Village, Illinois, in a giant data centre (a big beige, factory-like building with barbed wire and cooling towers).
Exactly how giant these centres are is quite secretive, as we’re told ‘Rule #1 about data centres. You don’t talk about data centres.’ Instead we talked about the 3 key issues a data centre must consider: power, dissipating heat, and bandwidth (how quickly you can get info into and out of the place). I was shocked to realise that the speed of light becomes an issue for bandwidth, and one company moved their centre from Philidelphia to New Jersey in order to serve the New York market more efficiently.
There are large and small players in the cloud computing market, with the 3 biggest being Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Wait, did I mention Microsoft? Oh never mind, this isn’t a sales talk. Ok, so why the heck is Amazon in this game? There is a huge spike in book sales for a few weeks leading up to Christmas, and Amazon had to build up the capacity to cover peak periods. This capacity isn’t needed for 11 months of the year, so they devised a way to rent it out and viola, a profitable new business emerged!
StartupCafe 
Interesting point about Amazon and their excess server capacity – does that mean my Amazon web services are going to go slow in December?
Hey Bill, thanks for posing the Q. I’d assume they lower the capacity they rent out in December to hopefully avoid interfering with their own biz processes, but I don’t know exact logistics. Interesting stat given: for Amazon, a difference of 100 milliseconds of time for a click results in sales dropping 1% – so they can’t afford a slowdown!