This started as a project like many others. There was a great concept, an idea, a strategy, a plan, and a creative, for engaging with the client’s audience.
The concept is great, the client loves it, it ticks all the right boxes it shows the human side of the brand, it (dreaded words) “could go viral” – all we have to do now is implement it. What could be simpler? Frankly, almost everything.
So the Q&A starts:
- How many visitors – loads
- How many uploads – as many as we can get
- How big will the files be – hmmm, anything from a few hundred K up to 10’s of megabytes
- How long is it going to run – don’t know
so, no change there then.
Now in the old days,we’d have a bit of a think, scribble some numbers into a spreadsheet, multiply everything up, say “how much?”, revisit the assumptions (how many people are really going to scan and upload all of their business cards?) vacillate between the two extremes of its trivial and it’ll melt down the web until eventually we stick a finger in the air take a deep breath and say don’t worry it’ll be fine on our existing infrastructure. Cue sleepless nights and lots of contingency plans, worst comes to the worst we can xxxxx, you can fill in the blanks.
But not any more.
Now we go, no sweat, when do you want it live? No panic, no worry, bandwidth – all you can eat , server getting overloaded, run up another one, overcapacity, shut one down. How cool is that?
And all because of Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing is the concept of using large virtual servers on the internet. Amazon and their ilk have to have massively more capacity than they use at any one time for resilience to cope with peak loads, all sorts of reasons. Rather than keeping this spare capacity sitting there doing nothing, there is a business to be made offering them it to other companies. And so were born Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3) offerings.
For a low rental price you can sign up for either or both of these services and away you go.
These services are most commonly used by Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. No up front investment in hardware and infrastructure, low ongoing costs and the ability to be “web scale” if you’re massively successful.
You can sign up online, choose your server capacity, choose a disk image, boot it up, install your software (an Apache web server and an Adobe ColdFusion server for example), point your DNS and away you go.
We have now set up our first client site on the Cloud. It is a promotional site, with relatively unknowable parameters that could use a lot of resources. By using the cloud we can be very confident that we can cope with any peaks that the internet can throw at us and we can scale accordingly. And when the promotion is over, we just scale back down onto some real servers somewhere. Better for us, better for the client, better for the visitor, better for Amazon, it really is a win, win, win, win situation.
The lesson here for brands is that Cloud Computing is an effective, and low cost way of getting large scale promotions onto the web at low risk. The downside, and the reason I wouldn’t suggest the cloud for mainstream systems, the “keep everything in the Cloud” approach, is the limitations of a relatively weak SLA and the immaturity of the solution. Recent episodes where both Amazon and Gmail disappeared for extended periods show the risks, acceptable for a promotion, a killer for your core applications.
The Project? Ah, all in good time, just watch this space.
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