Amazon Takes Another Step Towards The Web OS With Dynamo
Erick Schonfeld
15 comments »
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels just released a very technical paper about a Web storage system being tested internally at Amazon called Dynamo. As applications move to massive grids of computers on the Web (like the ones that power Amazon’s e-commerce site or Google’s search engine and online apps), a new type of Web operating system is developing that treats all of those connected servers as one big computer. (Engineering types can download a PDF of the paper or read it online at the Dynamo link above).
Dynamo is not an alternative to S3, Amazon’s publicly-available data storage service, or competing Web hosting/storage services like Nirvanix and Flexiscale (see previous post). There are no plans at this point to offer Dynamo as a Web Service. It is an internal-only project that sounds like a rethinking of what a relational database should be when computing scales to massive Web proportions (i.e., systems running on tens of thousands of computers).
As Nick Carr puts it:
At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.
The race to create a Web operating system is heating up. It is such a huge undertaking that there are only a few companies—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM— that can tackle it. But this time around, it is unlikely that any one of them is going to own it outright.
The race to own the Web?! Hm nice post, it’s definitely interesting to hear more about this Dynamo thing. And definitely interesting to see the competition between Amazon, Google and others, not really so much Microsoft, because many of their attempts at creating web-based services have ended up lacking, especially when they released that statement that web-based services only serve to enhance the desktop-client experience. All well and good, but I don’t want an overly bulky program slowing down my computer when you can take most of it and run it on da intarweb!
New online office suites popping up almost daily, now the battle for an online OS.
It’s enough to *almost* make you feel sorry for Microsoft.
….and Mr. Mike given Blodget’s valuation today for TechCrunch of $100,000,000.00 may I be the first to offer you $100,000,001.00? I’d need to have you finance some of this though.
google vs amazon…..game begins
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
yahoo and google have been using large-scale distributed “on the wire” high performance data stores for years. i will be interested to see what amazon is doing, but my guess is that it is just another red-black-tree on the network
Erick,
I disagree with your comment that “It is such a huge undertaking that there are only a few companies—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM— that can tackle it”
A Web OS, as we see it, shouldn’t be something delivered by just one company. It would be a big mistake for these companies to think that they should provide every aspect of the Web OS and push that out to consumers.
Our take is that the Web OS should involve many different applications, all provided by different companies. The job of the Web OS is not to create an all encompassing online set of applications, but rather to act as a central hub for customers to use the best online tools that are available. This allows for constant innovation on a level that even these giants alone couldn’t handle.
I invite all you developers out there that are creating industry or function specific applications to continue innovating. If Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM think that they are going to provide a Web OS without involving you, then let them do just that.
@ Nick
Good point you make there. I totally agree. From a simple applications view of things (not taking into account the more advance applications of webOS) I highly prefer Scrybe to any other online calendar
Looks like Amazon is really executing really well. Most people are not paying to much attention to these innovations/enhancements. Before you know it Amazon is going to have lots of the newer Web 2.0 companies hooked on their platform. Just as junkies loves crack, new start-ups will become dependent on Amazon. Bezos is very smart!!!!
The only problem is they are not opening it up as a service. It’s for them only. So it can only be used indirectly through their other APIs. You can’t just store any data you want. So technically it’s interesting, practically it means nothing.
Googles almost monopoly is not always positive, i hope that if these two giants get into war the grass under, this time around would flourish
Dynamo is not about a Web OS in the “provide users with a suite of applications and services online” sense. This is about the internal infrastructure required to maintain high-demand sites.
And why is this such a huge undertaking that only big companies can tackle it? There are already open source alternative to the Google File System (Kosmos File System) and Hadoop is a great open source alternative to Google’s Map/Reduce..
I never fully grasped the concept of a Web OS until I read the analogy to the electrical grid (I am not too bright so no big surprise). Now I am beginning to get it, Web OS is much much more than just S3 or virtual computing in my browser.
The Facebook acquisition of Parakey makes a lot more sense now.
The Future is in the Cloud! A Microsoft Cloud!
Most of you have certainly heard or read about the world-changing speech I gave at the MS Partner Conference! I said:
“We are in the process today of building out a services platform in the cloud,”
Yes, we have seen a future, a bright future where you no longer have to buy software, you rent it. You won’t have to worry about illegal software, media, music etc… being on your PC, we will remove it for you. You won’t have to worry about backing-up your personal documents, we will keep them for you in our cloud! Why bother with these things when we can do it all for you? The future is coming, and the key word we see for it is “conformity”, Software as a service, constant monitorting, security assured. We will talk more in the next few months, I know you are all as exicited about this new direction as I am.
I am starting to read these posts just to hear what Fake Steve Ballmer has to say. Although I find Erick Schonfeld’s reporting to be very refereshing/professional/well written. Keep it up.
@7, I completely agree that Amazon is doing things right on the insfrastructure side, but is undervalued…
Nirvanix offers 24/7 customer support, which is something Amazon lacks, that makes a huge difference in which one i would choose, clearly Nirvanix.