It’s not U2 splitting up and the guitarist starting a new band, but both “the edge” and “cloud” seem to be the up and coming buzz words at the moment – even though both have been around for a while, it could be that both are becoming more accepted by more traditional organisations.
CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) have been around pretty much since the dawn of the dot-com boom, I’ve worked with Akamai since 2000 while at Yahoo! The Edge services that Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront and companies like them can really benefit companies that require global reach without the huge cost of large data centre infrastructure.
Most companies that are serving web pages use CDN’s to reduce the load on their web or database servers to allow them to have infrastructure that copes with the average load and benefit from the CDN for peak traffic times. Where companies are distributing huge files (1GB-5GB video masters) where using youtube is not really an option this is where the CDN comes into its own.
When a user from afar requests a file, the request transparently goes through the CDN, if the request has not been seen before then it starts buffering the file over to the user and transfers the file to the mirror/caching servers on the Edge closest to the user. As origin to mirror transfer is faster than origin to user, by the time the user is watching the file it is cached on the mirrors and being served from there, not the origin servers. Now with the peer-to-peer CDN model (as used by various companies including the BBC for its Iplayer) the ability to scale when a video goes viral is even greater.
So any self respecting architect, Dev manager or technical director should look into using these services where they make sense – just remember that image, JS and css file caching is a bitch when you are trying to debug issues and you forget that pesky CDN.
The Cloud is normally an easier sell:
•Reduced Cost
Cloud technology is paid incrementally
Cloud technology is paid incrementally
•Highly Automated
No longer do Infrastructure personnel need to worry about keeping software up to date.
No longer do Infrastructure personnel need to worry about keeping software up to date.
•Flexibility
Cloud computing offers much more flexibility to scale both horizontally and vertically.
Cloud computing offers much more flexibility to scale both horizontally and vertically.
But you cannot just throw everything on to it without thinking. Security is an issue and from a data integrity point of view it’s true that some providers do not have good SLA’s. BUT – if you don’t have a data storage back-up and disaster recovery plan on your physical servers you may as well just throw it up on the cloud anyway, you’d be no worse off!
Security – to be honest, the main service providers (Rackspace, Amazon, Google) have better security measures in place for their data centres than you do. And if you get hacked via a web-service that could happen if the web-service was on your physical servers.
The biggest benefit for the cloud now is the automation of instances being brought online when certain criteria are hit. This takes the main pain out of constantly monitoring your systems to anticipate when you need a new slice started.
Cloud – yes you should, but please make sure you plan ahead otherwise your experience will be painful.
The Edge (CDN’s) – yes you should if you want to alleviate some load on your DB servers and web-servers to help cope with peak traffic times and overall help reduce the need for expensive hardware until you’ve adopted the cloud!
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