High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Scalability Perspectives is a series of posts that highlights the ideas that will shape the next decade of IT architecture. Each post is dedicated to a thought leader of the information age and his vision of the future. Be warned though – the journey into the minds and perspectives of these people requires an open mind.

Nicholas Carr

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His provocative 2004 book Does IT Matter? set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business.

The Big Switch – Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

Carr's core insight is that the development of the computer and the Internet remarkably parallels that of the last radically disruptive technology, electricity. He traces the rapid morphing of electrification from an in-house competitive advantage to a ubiquitous utility, and how the business advantage rapidly shifted from the innovators and early adopters to corporate titans who made their fortune from controlling a commodity essential to everyday life. He envisions similar future for the IT utility in his new book

• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

You want to have a scalable website. You want a website which can handle traffic spikes (think if you are getting on Digg, Slahsdot, Reddit, Techcrunch or other very popular websites frontpage).

Regular hosting companies (especially shared hosting) can offer only so much. The servers usually get crushed under the load in short time.

But there is hope. A new breed of hosting companies emerged recently. A new breed which can offer you the scalability you need at a fraction of the cost.

Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing).

Here's a website which compiled a list of cloud computing hosting companies (with short descriptions, prices and customer lists for each of them).

Read the entire article about Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing list at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

Update 2: Nice introductory New York Time's article Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still. Good example of how Animoto used RightScale and Amazon to meet a Facebook driven demand of 25,000 test drives an hour.
Update: Peter Laird in Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry paints a very cool visual map of all the cloud service players. It's a larger industry than you might think.

Once upon a time I worked at an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch startup. Over a delicious Christmas punch my grandma asked me what I did for a living that I could afford such extravagantly inexpensive gifts. Always so subtle. I explained I worked on an ATM switch. Mistake. She sniffed, said that's nice, and asked me why the Automated Teller Machine ate her bank card that morning. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't convince her I didn't work on bank ATMs. To all future job interrogations I waxed off, protesting I do boring software stuff that nobody cares about.

Not put off in the least, grandma asked me last night to explain this cloud computing thing she keeps hearing about at her church club. Afraid of being another victim of the distortion field surrounding cloud computing, I instead referred her to Kent Langley's excellent overview of the subject in Cloud Computing: Get Your Head in the Clouds. It does a good job demystifying the very confusing concept of cloud computing. It has nice diagrams, definitions, examples and is a great place to start.

She agreed that she had learned a lot, but one thing still troubled her: what's the difference between cloud computing and utility computing? They seem to be the same to her. Always so perceptive. She felt sure if she could drive this point home she would score big points with her church group. Oh the pressure.