Scalability Perspectives #1: Nicholas Carr – The Big Switch

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

... and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine. - Thomas Edison Carr's vision is that IT services delivered over the Internet are replacing traditional software applications from our hard drives. We rely on the new utility grid to connect with friends at social networks, track business opportunities, manage photo collections or stock portfolios, watch videos and write blogs or business documents online. All these services hint at the revolutionary potential of the new computing grid and the information utilities that run on it. In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed with the rise of electric utilities in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society - for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think - promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society - that made us who we are - the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century. The utilitarians as Carr calls them can deliver breakthrough IT economics through the use of highly efficient data centers and scalable, distributed computing, networking and storage architecture. There's a new breed of Internet company on the loose. They grow like weeds, serve millions of customers a day and operate globally. And they have very, very few employees. Look at YouTube, the video network. When it was bought by Google in 2006, for more than $1 billion, it was one of the most popular and fastest growing sites on the Net, broadcasting more than 100 million clips a day. Yet it employed a grand total of 60 people. Compare that to a traditional TV network like CBS, which has more than 23,000 employees.

Goodbye, Mr. Gates

So is the title for Chapter 4 of the book. “The Next Sea change is upon us.” Those words appeared in an extraordinary memorandum that Bill Gates sent to Microsoft's top managers and engineers on October 30, 2005. “Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions [of users] will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprise or small businesses.” This new wave, he concluded, “will be very disruptive.”

IT in 2018: From Turing’s Machine to the Computing Cloud

Carr's new internet.com eBook concludes that thanks to the theory of Alan Turing's Universal Computing Machine and the rise of modern virtualization technologies:

• With enough memory and enough speed, Turing’s work implies, a single computer could be programmed, with software code, to do all the work that is today done by all the other physical computers in the world.
• Once you virtualize the computing infrastructure, you can run any application, including a custom-coded one, on an external computing grid.
• In other words: Software (coding) can always be substituted for hardware (switching).

Into the Cloud

Carr demonstrates the power of the cloud through the example of the answering machine which have been vaporized into the cloud. This is happening to our e-mails, documents, photo albums, movies, friends and world (google earth?), too. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll probably remember that the first telephone answering machine you used was a bulky, cumbersome device. It recorded voices as analog signals on spools of tape that required frequent rewinding and replacing. But it wasn’t long before you replaced that machine with a streamlined digital answering machine that recorded messages as strings of binary code, allowing all sorts of new features to be incorporated into the device through software programming. But the virtualization of telephone messaging didn’t end there. Once the device became digital, it didn’t have to be a device anymore – it could turn into a service running purely as code out in the telephone company’s network. And so you threw out your answering machine and subscribed to a service. The physical device vaporized into the “cloud” of the network.

The Great Enterprise of the 21st Century

Carr considers building scalable web sites and services a great opportunity for this century. Good news for highscalability.com :-) Just as the last century’s electric utilities spurred the development of thousands of new consumer appliances and services, so the new computing utilities will shake up many markets and open myriad opportunities for innovation. Harnessing the power of the computing grid may be the great enterprise of the twenty-first century.

Information Sources

• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
• Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage
• IT in 2018: From Turing’s Machine to the Computing Cloud
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

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Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing - list of top providers

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.

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How do you explain cloud computing to your grandma?

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. I steadied myself and explained 3Tera’s take is that cloud computing is for service users and utility computing is for service builders. Cloud computing is essentially about the surrender of control. Users of a service like Salesforce.com don’t care how the site is implemented. They don’t care about how it scales, deals with failure, or any of the other 1000s of little details you have to care about when running a complicated operation. Users just want their service to work when they need it. Utility computing customers on the other hand require fine control over their resources because they are the builders of services like Salesforce.com. Cloud computing is built on utility computing. You couldn’t build a Salesforce.com on Google whereas you could build it on top of 3Tera or Amazon. StorageMojo thinks all this cloud/utility nonsense is just foggy thinking. Real computing will stay local because the cost of network access is too high. Memory and CPU are plentiful and cheap while bandwidth is neither. Distributed computing 1990s style will still rule the day. Mike Nygard thinks there’s A Cloud for Everyone in the future. Latency matters and “Keeping your endpoints on your own network at least lets you control your own latency.” Security matters and pushing your precious data into the hands of strangers isn’t secure. Yet we see SalesForce, Google Docs, Basecamp, SugarCRM, and hosted email all flourishing so is privacy really a concern for newer generations trying to get stuff done? HP’s Patrick Eitenbichler thinks “utility computing refers to a business model, while cloud computing describes the underlying IT architecture” with the real decision point being “utility/cloud computing vs. purchasing your own IT assets.” Geva Perry writing for GigaOM essentially agrees with Mr. Eitenbichler saying: Utility computing relates to the business model in which application infrastructure resources — hardware and/or software — are delivered. While cloud computing relates to the way we design, build, deploy and run applications that operate in a virtualized environment, sharing resources and boasting the ability to dynamically grow, shrink and self-heal. Krish tries to condense that down to: cloud computing is software as a service (where companies run their own software) and utility computing is hardware as a service (where you can run your own software). Margaret Rouse makes a good case for cloud computing being just a better marketing concept for utility/grid/cluster/distributed/parallel computing. Bits or Pieces smartly ignores saying the word cloud but my impression is they think providing Software as a Service on a utility computing basis is the game changing innovation. James Urquhart defines the cloud to include: SaaS, PaaS (e.g. force.com) and HaaS (e.g. Amazon, Mosso, etc.). SaaS is in clearly in play today, HaaS is being experimented with, but PaaS may be the most interesting facet of the cloud in the long term. Keystones and Rivets finds that “The Cloud” is grid computing wrapped up in a service offered by data centers. Confident I must have answered her original question, I asked “Now, doesn’t that clear things up grandma?” Grandma sniffed, said that's all very nice, but she still wanted to know why the ATM ate her bank card! I groaned and said “Goodnight grandma. I’ll call again next week.” “Excellent,“ she Cheshire smiled, “next week my church group is going to tackle if social networks are really monitizeable.”

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