ReadWriteWeb

Google tonight announced a reseller and accreditation program for Google Apps. Resellers, after being trained by Google, can now market, support, and customize Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. Resellers will get training and support from Google, as well as tools for sales, marketing, and integrating Google Apps into their customers' existing architectures. Google has already rolled out a pilot of this program to more than 50 partners worldwide.

It is quite a remarkable feeling to watch as the pieces fall into place and the picture, anticipated for so long, is finally revealed in all its splendour. As with any jigsaw that lacked a guiding picture on the box, the final result is that inevitable mix of vindication and surprise. Some areas of the picture are wholly unexpected, some look as one predicted, while across most of the image there are new facets to explore in familiar places, anticipated scenes to compare with long-held expectations, and assumptions to challenge or validate.

Rackspace, one of the world's largest hosting providers, announced two major acquisitions today: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it will now also support Rackspace's new cloud storage solution.

Google had a bad week in cloud computing, with serious downtime in Gmail, Blogger and Spreadsheet. Back in July it was Amazon that was embarrassed with their S3 outage. If you measure on total downtime, cloud computing still looks good compared to traditional hosting or in-house data centers. But that glosses over the psychological and market confidence issues, when a problem hits everybody at the same time. In contrast, when was the last time you heard about a massive Skype outage? Maybe it is time to look more seriously at P2P?

Mosso, the cloud hosting service from Rackspace, will today debut a file storage service called CloudFS. The new service will compliment Mosso's flagship end-to-end cloud hosting, the Hosting Cloud, which we reviewed in February, by providing unlimited, scalable storage. Mosso provides a more managed approach to cloud hosting services than some of its competitors, but CloudFS is a standalone API-based service comparable to Amazon's S3.

3Tera, a company based in California, has announced what it calls a breakthrough technology - "disposable infrastructure". This technology is the foundation of their product AppLogic, which they say is the "first grid operating system that runs and scales existing web applications." It almost takes a Comp Sci PhD from Stanford to read 3Tera's press release, but in a nutshell what AppLogic does is allow Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser. Here's more from the press release:

"The system enables existing software to be packaged into completely self-contained, portable applications that can be easily deployed and scaled to dozens of servers on demand on any AppLogic grid, anywhere in the world. As a result, open source developers, Web 2.0 and SaaS companies can rapidly deploy Web applications without owning and operating hardware infrastructure, and pay only for the resources they actually use."

The term for this is 'utility computing', aka 'on-demand computing'. It means that a service provider makes available computer resources to their clients and charges them for the usage rather than the hardware. Kind of like a public utility such as your electricity company. Read/WriteWeb contributer Alex Iskold called this 'Compute Services' in his recent Web Platform Primer post.

Scaling Web apps

This extract from 3Tera's About page gives some background on the problems of scaling:

"Successful online services have millions of users. Serving that many users means scaling the application to hundreds and often thousands of servers. But scaling online applications is an enormously difficult problem. It took companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon 10 years to learn how to do this well. This knowledge is among their most closely guarded secrets. It is not by accident thatGoogle has more patents on load balancing than on search.

3Tera has solved this problem. Our product, AppLogic, is the first grid operating system that runs and scales existing real-world web applications on grids of commodity servers. The breakthrough technology that enables this is called disposable infrastructure."

Dispose of your servers

So what do they mean by 'disposable infrastructure'? In the press release Vlad Miloushev, president & CEO, notes:

"3Tera is working with hosting providers to offer reliable self-serve utility computing services that make Web applications easy to deploy, manage and scale. In the next decade, only the largest enterprises will be able to justify owning and operating their own servers."
(emphasis mine)

Interesting comment that in the near future only "the largest enterprises" will own and operate their own servers. I imagine in the future specialist companies like 3Tera, along with the big Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, will operate 'server farms' that become too cost efficient for other companies not to utilize.

3Tera - a company to watch

3Tera strikes me as a company to keep an eye on - they're tackling a complex problem and they have a lot of potential customers out there. Look at all the 'web 2.0' startups that have popped up over the past year or so - most of them have big dreams of scaling up to hundreds of thousands, or millions, of users. 3Tera could be just the solution they turn to.

Amazon has just released a companion product to its online storage solution S3. With a name almost as surreal as Mechanical Turk (which is Amazon's collective intelligence service), the new 'compute' service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It all sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie, but it is Amazon at its innovative best once again. Here's the official blurb:

"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud."

For the tech skinny, check out Sergey Schetinin's write-up.

Interestingly Alex Iskold predicted a compute service from Amazon in a R/WW post just a couple of days ago!! If you haven't yet read Alex's Web Platform Primer - what's available via API?, then I thoroughly recommend it. He really captures the high level of why products like Amazon EC2 are increasingly important in today's Web landscape.

Note that Amazon EC2 is currently "a limited beta", available only to "a select group of developers [...] who have been making Amazon Web Services requests in the past month." Thanks Sergey and Alex for the heads-up (they both got the email announcement).