Slicehost

Slicehost was founded two years ago and quickly became one of the more popular cloud computing and hosting companies on the Internet. Slicehost's offering are mostly complimentary to Rackspace's services and Slicehost expects to integrate Rackspace's new CloudFiles storage solution in the near future.

Slicehost also announced a number of new features, including the availability of larger 'slices' and lower prices for its high-end offerings.

JungleDisk

By acquiring JungleDisk, Rackspace is now supported by one of the most popular online backup and file storage solutions. Rackspace is planning to integrate JungleDisk into all its products, but it will also continue to support S3.

Challenging Amazon

With these new services, Rackspace is directly competing with Amazon's Web services. The JungleDisk acquisition and the new cloud storage services go up against Amazon's S3, while the Slicehost acquisition competes directly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

Thanks to its established user base, Rackspace is in a good position to challenge Amazon's cloud computing services and, if anything, it is good to see that the competition in this space is heating up.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

P2P Innovation in Startups

This week we also saw the launch of Wuala, a P2P Cloud Storage solution (our review here).

Earlier, we reviewed a P2P approach to search (Faroo) and a P2P approach to video sharing (Metaaso).

With the exception of Skype, these are all tiny little start-ups. Interestingly, they have all originated outside America:

Skype - telephony - Estonia
Wuala - storage - Switzerland
Faroo - search - Germany
Metaaso - video - India.

This geographic origin may not be coincidental.

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun. These are all American firms, with access to plenty of capital. Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups that are starved for capital. You replace capital with technical innovation. That was true for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun as well when they started.

That is why I have believed for some time that P2P is the next big disruptive technology at the infrastructure level.

P2P and Bigcos

Disruptive technology sometimes needs support from big companies as well. Fortunately for P2P, 3 very big companies would benefit greatly from more use of P2P as infrastructure - Microsoft, Apple and Intel. It's a great way to mop up those underutilized desktop CPU cycles. And attack the cloud computing incumbents.

Historically, P2P start-ups have tended to focus on music sharing and have been hurt by legal issues, but they have been fine technically. Skype makes P2P respectable and proves that scalability does not have to be an issue. Skype is taking on one the biggest and most entrenched industries in the world and millions of people increasingly rely on Skype as a mission critical alternative to landlines or cellphones.

P2P: Next Big Thing for Infrastructure

P2P infrastructure could play very well behind the enterprise firewall. It reduces CIO security fears about too many cloud based apps outside the firewall. This is important for P2P start-ups. They would need a lot of capital to go to market entirely with a consumer/SOHO offering. If they can get enterprise adoption at the same time, then they can accelerate cash flow and reduce need for funding.

Watch the P2P space. It's the next big wave of innovation at the infrastructure level.

"CloudFS is the next step in our overall mission to provide the industry's most flexible and broadest range of hosting options -- from traditional complex managed hosting to cloud compute solutions," said Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce in a press release.

CloudFS launches today to a limited number of customers in free private beta. The private beta will last until the third quarter of 2008, at which time the service will open in a public beta. The target price at the time is $0.15/per gigabyte.

Some wondered after Google's App Engine announcement Monday evening when Microsoft would offer a competing cloud computing platform. The biggest tip off from the job advertisement that Red Dog is it, is that the CIS team wants the platform to "lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications." Microsoft will supposedly roll out a first version of Red Dog to "external customers" (defined later as "ISV customers who are ... early adopters") this year.

As Kniskern points out, not much is known about Red Dog at this point, but indications seem to point to some sort of platform as a service offering from Microsoft dropping within the next year.

Note: No, that's not a real Red Dog logo. It's just Clifford The Big Red Dog with a tiny Windows Live logo dangling from his collar...

"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 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).