@FOWA : IT Infrastructure Commoditisation

One of the themes at the Future of Web Apps is the commoditisation of IT infrastructures. Both Wener Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com and Simon Wardley of Zimki discussed how they were building business models based on providing infrastructure as a service.

(While both of them focused on the infrastructure challenges, it is worth checking out this article on how Google is looking to get into the enterprise market - the value proposition is elegant : "Managing enterprise software has become ridiculously complex so why spend valuable resources on it when it isn't your core business?")

Wardley made the point that when something is rare, it is a competitive advantage but when it is ubiquitous and distributed it just becomes a cost of doing business. His bottom line : "There is no competitive advantage in having your own web infrastructure" .

This makes sense since not only is repitively provisioning new operating systems, databases, web servers, etc. boring but it is extremely inefficient. Why should everyone be patching, upgrading and monitoring when doing this doesn't provide any competitive advantage.

Wener Vogels wants us to "compete on ideas, not resources" and sees Amazon as the ideal partner to provide the infrastructure.

Based on a paper by John Hagel and John Seely Brown titled "Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources" (pdf) he described a Push vs. Pull model in providing resources. The forces driving alternative resource models include:

• increased uncertainty
• growing power of customers
• intensifying competition
• greater focus on learning and improvision

The challenges to get the infrastructure working right is not trivial - you have to deal with the network, hardward, O/S and all sorts of configurations across all of them. This coupled with the fact that 8% of hard drives fail a year makes this a scary proposition if you have a large online presence.

Amazon is working on a new Pull Model - resources on demand where all your services are coming out of Amazon web services and you only pay for what you use.

The value proposition from Amazon is that this is:

• Scalable - increase or decrease capacity in minutes
• Cost-effective - low rate, pay as you go
• Reliable
• Simple SOAP and REST calls
• Compatabiletransmission between services, decreased latency and consistency