Release It Again

Pete Lacey -- what he said, about Release It and Michael Nygard's blog.

If you find yourself in a panic over some centralized resource, wonder if the full costs are accounted for. What alternatives might exist for decentralizing, and how do the cost/benfits really add up over time?

The cost of operations is dropping. The cost of change is still too high for many to take advantage of that though. By the time we can get our systems onto more budget-friendly architectures... well, I guess heading in that direction puts you on the path toward even better things.

Depending on the business, if one extrapolates out from one's current position, through the point where more open/available/scalable systems are in use... well, then is this evidence that for most of us, our ultimate position is out in "software as a service/utility" land? Exactly who should be in the data center business five to ten years from now?

Another data point shows up. (Oh, and speaking of cost of change, it's in Erlang and it provides a REST api available from any language.)

From the SimpleDB FAQ...

Q: Where is my data stored?

Amazon SimpleDB stores your data in our multiple data centers in the United States. We anticipate adding other geographies over time.

Q: Does Amazon store its own data in Amazon SimpleDB?

Yes. Developers within Amazon use Amazon SimpleDB for a wide variety of projects. Many of these projects use Amazon SimpleDB as their authoritative data and query store and rely on it for business-critical operations.

So, "business-critical" seems kind of reliable. Not just scaled out databases, but scaled out data centers. Those are even more expensive to operate on your own.