GigaOm today released their list of "10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure"
GigaOm named me one of “10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure”. The article introducing the list describes the shifts now ongoing in the industry towards infrastructure, platform, and software as a service. In the past I’ve characterized this trend as “separating physical from virtual servers”. It is beneficial from a software management perspective but it also allows for resource savings in the underlying hardware, because it allows you to redefine reliability.
For example, in most “in-house” data centers, reliability is defined as keeping a particular piece of software running on a particular server 100% of the time. But if you design the software properly so it doesn’t depend on any one physical server (as Google does, for example) then the software will route around a server that dies. That means you no longer need to have two power supplies on each server, which saves electricity and capital costs, and if a server dies you just recycle it, no fuss, no muss. That’s a pretty good deal!
