Information Weekly: Web New Foundation

Web

Wen/aaron ricadela,thomas claburn,charles Babcock translation/Zhu Yudan

Web2.0 is still in the basic construction phase, and the reasonable system structure is closely related to the 6 key issues.

Search, photos, music, video, mashup Applications (MASH-UPS), wikis (wikis), blogs, communities, and high-definition images from all over the world to show the beauty of heaven--together they form the rich content of the Web2.0 boom. But for the growing new generation of Web services, perhaps the most important is not content, but through the browser window, so that users have a more interesting experience.

To have a place in this web world, you need to grasp the know-how to create interactive websites. And what are the know-how and business models behind such successful websites? Leaders in business and technology, including Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos of Amazon (Amazon), Microsoft (Microsoft, Microsoft), Rey Ozzie (Ray Ozzie) and Deborah Krapati (Debra chrapaty , Google (Google, Google), Eric Schmidt, the salesforce.com company's Marc Benioff (Marc Benioff) and Skype's Nicholas Jenstrom (Niklas Zennstrom recently explored the future of new Web applications in San Francisco (San Francisco). We know that Web2.0 needs a new software and server architecture, as well as a different IT infrastructure. The following key topics will be discussed separately from 6 aspects: scale, content management, security, development technology, user experience and community.

Scale effect

Very few people on the website soon expect to welcome millions or tens other visits. But it really happened. According to comscore networks, an Internet traffic measurement agency, YouTube has risen from a hundred thousand of visits a year ago to 2 in September 2006, 000多万次 US independent visits (Unique Visitor).

For most websites, the network and it architectures are not as important as you think. True, without the scalable and usable IT resources, there is no business-this is the Web2.0 company's common starting capital, rather than the personalized resources that differentiate them. Despite the sophistication and strong technical architecture behind Google Video, YouTube has overtaken it, won the support of a large number of end-users, and finally forced Google to buy and compete with its former rivals. Of course, the infrastructure is just one of the stakes. To be a shoo-in, you need to have more chips: creativity, community vitality and unique charm.

In fact, Web2.0 start-ups do not necessarily have to have their own data centers at the beginning. Online retailer Amazon splits its infrastructure services into small chunks and sells them to startups that need strong computing power. Although elements in the architecture-such as servers, operating systems, database software, network connectivity and so on-are critical, Adam Selipske Adam Selipsky, the Amazon Web services company's vice president for product management and research and development, said. But there is no new content added to the user experience. Selipske points out that the components of these infrastructures can be very resource-intensive: Companies need to invest 70% of their resources to build and maintain their IT infrastructures.

Unlike the first web expansion boom, when everyone bought millions of dollars of servers and quickly expanded into the truth, today's 2.0 startups are not obsessed with the underlying components of computing power. "We certainly don't think the underlying data centers are at the heart of our business or value positioning," said Don MacAskill, chief executive and co-founder of Tang Mccargell, SmugMug, the online photo-sharing website. "SmugMug employs Amazon's S3 storage service, which connects a large array of storage devices through storage management software, which improves the IT architecture within SmugMug.

"It's very simple, because Amazon is doing a complex job of copying files between multiple data centers and storage media," said Chris MacAskill, president and co-founder of SmugMug Chris Mccargell.

SmugMug has only 18 employees, but deals with 180,000 paid users and 115 million pictures. "We think our value orientation is the user experience," Tang Mccargell concludes, "which includes our Web user interface and customer service." ”

Tang Mccargell that extending customer service may be more difficult than extending the server. SmugMug, a data center in Silicon Valley just next to YouTube, and two of companies facing the same infrastructure challenges, such as servers, redundancy and self-healing filesystems, commented: "It would be a bit silly to try to invent the wheel if we don't choose a commercially available product." ”

Many infrastructure units have off-the-shelf products. According to David Dudas, co-founder and chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the online video editing website Eyespot, these off-the-shelf products include: inexpensive, but powerful Intel (Intel) chip servers, supplied by multiple vendors, David Dudas. And the cost of bandwidth is significantly lower than a few years ago, low-cost and space-saving disk storage devices, as well as open source software, including free enterprise-class operating systems (Fedora Linux), relational database (MySQL), network server (Apache) and application Framework (AJAX).

The advantage of eyespot is that it can combine these fragmented products into an extensible online video-editing platform, Mr Dudas said analysis says. "If you don't know how to put them together correctly, those inexpensive hardware is useless to you, and when you reach the 50 million user threshold, a poor architecture can cause the system to malfunction or go down." ”

This is indeed a challenge. One of the key points is that these IT components are grouped together, such as servers, databases, routers, but they can be extended independently of each other. Another important point is that you have to recognize the different media services, streaming media, picture services, Web services, databases and other resources needed

is different.

The way to rent a data center may only apply to the present. "We also need to build our own system," Aric Zeniek Arik Czerniak, co-founder and CEO of Metacafe, the third-largest Internet ranking company, said recently. "ComScore networks data show that last September Metacafe had 16.6 million independent user visits and 492 million pages of readings worldwide. "To this scale, it's a huge technical challenge to make sure the site runs smoothly," Zeniek. ”

Iya Hersog (Eyal Hertzog), co-founder and chief product Officer (CPO), revealed that Metacafe designed its own software architecture, including services, template libraries (Template libraries), statistical evaluation, versioning, and architecture monitoring. At the same time, online video sites also rely on network content to push company Limelight Networks services to cache files for more efficient access and host hosting by the host service provider Rackspace Company. Metacafe uses lamp (on behalf of Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.) to combine software packages.

For Metacafe, effective adjustment means that thousands of servers are needed now and only hundreds of are needed. "If we're still using the old technology at the start, we might need 10,000 servers now," Zeniek said. ”

--Wen/thomas Claburn