Amazon began life as a bookseller, and they extended their reach to
become a very large retail supplier of almost everything. But their
service business has grown faster than their retail business: (01)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/21/net-us-amazon-cloud-idUSBRE96K04B20130721 (02)
Some excerpts:
> After years of being dismissed as a supplier of online computer
> services to startups and small businesses, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
> beat out International Business Machines this year to snag a $600
> million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. (03)
> Public cloud computing, which AWS pioneered in 2006, lets companies
> rent computing power, storage and other services from data centers
> shared with other customers - typically cheaper and more flexible
> than maintaining their own. (04)
> Five companies vied for the contract - AWS, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and
> another unidentified firm, according to a report on the bidding by
> the U.S. Government Accountability Office. (05)
My only knowledge of AWS comes from reading some of their documentation
and some miscellaneous articles about it. They provide some flexible,
high-speed methods for indexing, finding, and updating anything in
their clouds. (06)
But I noticed that 2006, when AWS started, is also the year when the
DAML project finished its basic tools: RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. Amazon
does not use any of those tools. But I noticed that some people have
stored data that contains RDF links in AWS. (07)
I also noticed that one of the Amazon tools, SimpleDB, is implemented
in Erlang. That language was designed to support concurrent processing
with multiple threads, especially for use by large telecoms. (08)
AWS probably uses Erlang (or techniques inspired by Erlang) for other
purposes, especially for their method of "autoscaling", which is
"a feature that automatically adds or removes computing power in
response to application use." For a brief overview of Erlang,
see http://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html . (09)
> "Auto-scaling is very complex and there are not many cloud providers
> that can do it well, but Amazon is great at it," said Kyle Hilgendorf,
> a cloud computing analyst at Gartner. (010)
Erlang is an example of the kinds of tools that mainstream developers
are willing to adopt and use for mission-critical applications. One
more example: Facebook uses Erlang to support their chat backend. (011)
Why haven't developers found a way to build multi-billion dollar
technology on top of the SW tools? They might provide some support
for importing data from those tools, but they don't use them as the
foundation for their technology. Why not? (012)
John (013)
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