Outsourced Infrastructure - It's a whole new ball game

There can be no question; we are entering a new age for infrastructure outsourcing. The services now offered by Amazon have reached a threshold where several companies exist entirely its data centers and have a very clear view of what will it cost to scale their operations.

The cost predictability and reliability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) make it a lot simpler to plan the evolution of online services since you have an exact map of how much your infrastructure costs will be on reaching each level of usage. You will still need to figure out how your application behaves under load, however, as soon as you have that information you will be able to turn capacity planning into financial planning.

The levels of granularity in which these new services operate are also revolutionary and will have a profound impact in the hosting industry where the minimum unit in which services where provided was the Virtual Private Server - either a virtualized operating system or a virtual machine. These new services operate as servers as virtual machines but now the allocation units are CPUs and they are charged by actual CPU usage. You pay for the storage space, CPU, memory and bandwidth you actually used. This is truly on-demand computing and this model will have serious impact on how traditional hosting centers operate.

Several companies have come out with services that follow the path laid out by AWS, the most significant of them being Google with its Google AppEngine service. There is little chance that this new approach to hosting will go away and as more and more companies start to take notice of it, traditional players in the hosting and infrastructure outsourcing market have to reevaluate their positions.

I have seen companies that have solutions ranging from 1 to over 40 servers in outsource hosting operations, considering the move to AWS. These companies are currently using service providers that range minor Internet hosting providers to IBM and they are coming to realize that not only there are new players in the game but there might actually be a new game in town.