One resource to rule them all,

One resource to find them,

One resource to bring them all,

And in the darkness bind them,

In the land of server where the shadows lie.

It’s been a bumpy road to peoples understanding of the EC2 service. And a large part of the problem is a point of view gap between the masses, and Amazon. It’s a lot like an American visiting India wondering why he cant order a steak (disclaimer: I don’t actually know whether you can order a steak in India, but the point essentially remains.) They have a different point of view in regards to the cow.

So too does amazon have a different point of view on resources. Your average web guy sees a server as a single resource: “that server is very powerful it could do a LOT” or “thats an old server, not a lot can be done with it” Because for so long we was able to get X number of servers, those servers would be assigned roles, and thats what they were. A better server could crawl more pages, or store a larger database, or serve more page views. And of course this meant that the server was specific to the application. But this model gets more and more difficult to maintain as the project gets larger and larger. Anyone who’s gone from 15 to 85 servers knows this. And it boils down to one single point: Permanence does not scale.

So the amazon guys decided to look at things differently. Your basic components of a server are Mhz, RAM, Bandwidth, and disk space. And they look at a server as a pool of those specific resources. You don’t have 15 good servers, you have 180,000 Mhz, and 120 Gb of ram, and 13,500 Gb of disk space.

And since permanence doesn’t scale… permanence is built OUT. This is a difficult concept to grasp for most people, and building an application which doesn’t rely on permanence is difficult (myself included!) It’s a learning process, but a necessary one. Once people learn to put permanence in the right places — once we all figure out the tricks of the trade I am of the opinion that the web as a whole will become a much more stable place.

There certainly will be some growing pains though. For example right now a huge pain the dependence on popular database products (MySQL, PostgreSQL) which are wonderful, don’t get me wrong, But they are, currently, limited to the realm of the server, instead of the realm of the cloud
So lets all put our heads together and start thinking of ways in which we can make use of the cloud as a cloud. We can do this!