Racklabs - Thoughts on the Hosted IT Revolution

Clouds Everywhere, Including Rackspace

Big news from Google this week. As expected, they launched an application hosting offer called AppEngine.

I am not going to dwell on the details of what it can and cannot do since that has been covered ad nauseam on the web. Either way, this move was expected, and is a great proof point of the hosting revolution ahead of us. There are millions of servers in the world providing all sorts of compute functionality. Over the next decade, we think that this computing will be done in a different model – the hosting model. In the past there were two main ways computing was done: in house (or, do-it-yourself) and outsourced (i.e. IBM comes in and does it for you). Hosting is a totally new way to do computing. It started with web-specific technologies but is invading all sorts of things in IT now. Hosting, when done right, offers more power and more reliability at a lower cost than either doing it yourself or outsourcing.

Now, what about all these clouds? I will be doing a series of posts on them. But here are a few key thoughts:

First point, EC2/S3 and AppEngine are flavors of hosting, but not the same thing. Amazon is what I call a “components cloud.” You can buy raw compute and storage. What you do with it is up to you. AppEngine is what I call a “whole stack” cloud. A series of tools are made available to you, and if you can build what you want with them, then you are in great shape- everything is taken care of. AppEngine is very prescriptive. That is the downside. If you fit however, it is a massive gain in power and capability. It’s the classic trade. Want flexibility, then you need to deal with complexity; willing to compromise, your life gets easy.

Second point, I think both types of clouds are here to stay and are important. Will some people move from one cloud to another? Sure. But, I believe most people will use different tools for different things.

Third point, Rackspace is committed to the cloud. Our strategy should become more apparent to the world in the coming months, but our Mosso offer has been in the wild for some time. We are advancing it fast and already 45,000 applications are running live on it. The Mosso offering is a “whole stack” cloud, but with a major difference from Google - we support commonly used stacks. LAMP, .Net and Ruby today. I think openness to standards and lack of so-called “cloud lock in” (i.e. you can’t move an app off AppEngine - they only support THEIR stack) will be key variables in the cloud race.

Fourth point, the hosting category also includes Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Email Hosting, Shared Hosting, as well as the relatively new “Cloud Hosting”. I don’t think the current flavors of hosting will die. The mass migration of computing to this new model should drive demands for all sorts of hosting. The idea that Google will host the Internet just seems unrealistic and counter to the history of business. I am biased in that view, but I believe that businesses and consumers alike will use many different flavors of hosting. Always.

This is an exciting time in our space. The hosting revolution is just getting going. The revolution centers on the idea that IT needs to do more, do it faster and do it cheaper. Cloud based hosting services should help make it happen. We look forward to being a part of it.