Disney Builds Private Cloud for Videogame Empire

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Cloud computing isn’t just a new way of hosting and running applications. It’s also a new way to think about how applications are designed in the first place, how they store and retrieve data. Joe Arnold was the chief technology officer at Engine Yard, a San Francisco company that offers a cloud service where developers can house their applications, and over the last half decade, he witnessed firsthand the shift towards a new way of building software that runs across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. “We were watching people build more mobile and web applications,” he says. “And how they used storage was a lot different from how it started when we first started doing infrastructure.”

That was because Engine Yard plugged into a cloud storage service from Amazon known as Simple Storage System, or S3. By stripping away many characteristics of traditional storage systems — such as the hierarchical “file folder” style of organization — S3 and systems like it can provide more speed and scalability while remaining extremely reliable. It’s an approach called “object storage,” and thanks to Amazon, it has become a popular way for websites and web applications to serve static content, such as images, videos, and other media…

But not everyone is ready to trust a cloud provider like Amazon with their data. Some companies want the power and flexibility of cloud services while still running everything in their own data centers, and these companies are embracing open source software that mimics the S3 way…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/swiftstack/