Guardian Activate Redux: Werner Vogels (Amazon)
I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July. Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it’s a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day… I’ll post up one video every few days or so…
Werner Vogels, Amazon – “Your worst nightmare on the web… you throw a party, and a MILLION people come… how do you cope with that?”
The area of cloud computing is increasingly fascinating… people are creating things around computers that they may need a phenomenal amount of storage space and processing power… but only for a brief period of time.
For instance, the Google Monopoly game which launched over the last week needed a lot more server power than they expected it to… and as such crashed on and off for about a week. They’ve just had to restart the whole thing all over again today…
Companies in those days needed electricity to do whatever it is that they made money from.
Werner’s example is a brewer in Belgium, but we have our very own relic of this age in the Gym breakout area in our building…
(It’s a particularly rare example controlled by table football…)
Think how mad it would be nowadays to run your own generator for a resource that comes out the wall, on tap, whenever you want it.
That’s essentially the proposition for ‘cloud computing’… computing that becomes a resource to be scaled when needed, and switched off when it’s not.
It touches on a previous post about working spaces I wrote a while ago… when computing becomes as free and easy as electricity to access, it’ll be interesting to see how we all work together.
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