Cloud, Schmoud -To Really Succeed, Web Companies Need Their Own Data Centers
March 6, 2014
Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.
Nearly 10 years ago Excite and Jotspot founder Joe Kraus exulted: "There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one." Powerful open-source software running on cheap, commodity hardware meant that entrepreneurs could get to scale and/or profitability much faster without raising capital. Everything Kraus argued has proved to be true. It is also largely irrelevant.
As it turns out, while it’s cheap to get tens of millions of users with a free web or mobile service, building a large, data-driven business costs a lot of money, and that money is spent on the very thing that cloud computing was meant to obviate: data centers. For every 10 Instagrams that mushroom into prominence on the back of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or another public cloud provider, there is one Google or Facebook that insists upon building its own data centers to control its own destiny…
Data Centers Are A Sign Of Success
Of course, not everyone follows this model. Netflix, for example, famously sticks with AWS even as it scales to gargantuan levels. Content to let AWS invest heavily in infrastructure while it focuses on fine-tuning its service, Netflix is the exception to the rule…
Read more from the source @ http://readwrite.com/2014/03/06/data-centers-cloud-computing#awesm=~oxKAf3hmOxyo8k
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