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Re: [ontolog-forum] Amazon vs. IBM: Big Blue meets match in battle for t

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Donald C. Lindsay" <don.lindsay@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:11:38 -0700
Message-id: <01c101ce87e0$d7686450$86392cf0$@gmail.com>
Legacy systems, usually.    (01)

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 10:01 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Amazon vs. IBM: Big Blue meets match in battle for
the cloud    (02)

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:    (03)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/21/net-us-amazon-cloud-idUSBRE96K04B2
0130721    (04)

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.    (05)

> 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.    (06)

> 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.    (07)

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.    (08)

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.    (09)

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.    (010)

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 .    (011)

> "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.    (012)

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.    (013)

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?    (014)

John    (015)

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