Future Is Bright, Present Is Dim

• Pg 1 - Cloud Computing And The Web
• Pg 2 - Current Web Hosting Cloud
• Pg 3 - Future Web Hosting Cloud
• Pg 4 - Future Is Bright, Present Is Dim

So that was a great build-up and teardown of a technology that’s going to shift things in the web development world. What’s the final conclusion? My personal conclusion is that we’re approaching the tipping point, but we’re not quite there when it comes to the average webmaster being able to truly leverage cloud technology beyond what currently exists with hosted packages. It’s essentially a matter of time before someone big makes a significant move into this realm. It’s a little uncharted right now because it’s going to be halfway between Amazon’s offerings and a traditional hosted solution. The tricky part will be the fact Amazon leverages the fact that power computing has all kinds of peaks and valleys that ultimately offset themselves and if they don’t, it’s just a computing scheduling problem. Cloud web hosting will require persistent listening (web server), persistent IPs and will have peaks and valleys that synchronize more than they offset. Then there’s that pesky peak demand issue. You can’t just defer computing time for a web request the same way you can for a batch processing job that’s expected to take three days to complete. These are tough challenges to overcome, but if you consider the money and control that’s at stake, the great rewards will eventually push someone into the arena. When that time rolls around, the first carrot to draw webmasters will be cost savings, but cloud computing has so much more potential than simple cost reduction. It will let you think big without worrying about hosting issues. Ultimately it’s about allowing you to focus on your website and not on your web hosting.