web2.0-driven Internet basic technology change

Changes in the industry

In fact, the whole industry changes have been inadvertently occurred, even if it seems the most stable areas. Many people think that the Unix world is stable, the Windows world is fast changing, in fact just the opposite. The UNIX world is changing every minute. Similarly, at the most fundamental level of the Internet, changes are taking place at all times.

The foundation of the Internet is the bandwidth and the server. In the 95, the site is usually to pull a dedicated line to the office, connected to the "server". In fact, until now, many enterprises are still building the computer room. For example, I used to work in the tax newspaper, such as the past our brother unit economic daily, are their own room. These are rich, and more care about information security units, a special case.

The IDC generation I think is the way to generate benefits by centralizing bandwidth management. The machine is placed in the IDC trusteeship, it is cheaper than building the computer room, the investment is small, and IDC can make money. This is the profit generated by the scale effect. IDC meets 99% of the sites. In addition to the kind of state-owned enterprises and institutions just said.

What's more special is Google and Amazon. Their demand for bandwidth, cost control, overall size requirements, no IDC can afford. So also had to build their own room. Not only to build the computer room, in order to support their own services, they have to develop a strong software for management. Google's GFs and bigtable, for example, are used to store (a layer above the modified Linux file system), GWS for load balancing and Web services. Google is the world's largest IDC, measured by the number of machines and the number of bandwidth.

Amazon has done more interesting things. In addition to the establishment of their own large-scale distribution of the computer room, completed a variety of software applications, but also the free resources to split open for rent. This is AWS (Aws.amazon.com). The most successful service for AWS applications is the storage service S3 (simple Storage Service) and the operational Services EC2 (Amazon elastic Compute Cloud). This stuff is cheap enough to be unthinkable, accounting for the cost will find that any smaller companies to build their own storage, not as good as the adoption of S3 cost-effective and safe, the small company's bandwidth input price will even exceed the purchase of the same bandwidth S3. And do not need to put the developer, directly use the line.

This is still the "scale effect of generating profits". As mentioned earlier, IDC has completed the scale effect of the "bandwidth" base. Amazon, which also has a lot of bandwidth, has a powerful software system that pushes up the scale of products that can be scaled up. No longer hard bandwidth and servers, but soft storage technology. This is what I call the Internet's basic technology.

Amazon's scale effect is much higher than IDC's. First, the amount of bandwidth purchased is greater and the price is cheaper. Second, the server and storage equipment unified procurement, the price is cheaper. Then, the development of their own software for unified management, greatly reducing the cost of management. The following two levels are not available to IDC. This is the power of the software.

New generation website and basic technology Desire

Instead of calling them Web 2.0, I'd rather call them a new generation of web sites. They have several features:

1 The goal is more shrinking set. Albums can be made into a large web site (flickr.com), bookmarks can be made into a large website (delicio.us), even a whiny message can be (twitter.com) ... Any single field is likely to become a separate service to be taken out.
2 companies are smaller. Compared to traditional internet companies, the number of new generation of Web site workers has become very small. No longer need so many edits, no longer need so many sales ...
3 of traditional industries poured in. A large number of traditional industries use existing resources to surprise the Internet. They are characterized by strong industry resources, profitability and technical capacity is poor.
4 The structure of the website becomes simpler. Because the target is shrinking, the structure of the website is simple.
5 The volume of content increased rapidly. Users create content is not empty talk, the new site content to increase the speed far higher than in the past.
6 between Web sites because of APIs, it is easier to connect with each other.

The goal is more focused, resulting in simple architecture, and strong interaction characteristics led to user contributions, making the company smaller, more pursuit of Low-cost. Application layer Technical requirements are reduced and basic technical requirements are improved. For example: Application layer on a BBS, but this BBS has 50 million posts. This is the need for storage technology, rather than simply change the BBS program can be solved. The past complex web site architecture has become a simple application + high stability + large load + high-capacity simple architecture. The structure is simple, but the difficulty is improved. A complex set of forum procedures is still simple, but to do a high stability + heavy load + high-capacity storage services, it is very difficult.

We are eager to wipe out the technological divide. Now make a website with a lot of optional components. For example, forums have open source programs, images can be placed on Flickr via Flickr APIs, maps can be used with Google Map APIs or 51ditu APIs, and Facebook APIs provide more functionality. With these things, making an imaginary application becomes much simpler. And, under the application of technical basic services, but still not rich enough. Only Amazon is a forward-looking step.

During our consultation process, we found that a large number of websites were unstable because of basic technical problems. The problem will become more pronounced in a year's period. This year's cumulative content and data will make a lot of Web sites are not strong technical foundation completely collapse.

Basic Technical Services

In my opinion, the basic technology is divided into several categories, the storage on the one hand, search on the other hand, load calculation. Tiny early Famous speech: Every site should have a reverse proxy cache, each site should have search technology. As for storage, not every site is needed, at least for most sites.

All companies are accustomed to renting offices rather than buying them. According to the reality and practicality of the new generation of websites, they should also prefer to hire these services. Amazon's S3 in the United States amply demonstrates this. We're starting to try out the rental search technology now looks good.

and the best service model, I think is to the room as a unit, in a computer room within the scope of the provision of basic technical services, so the speed is guaranteed, and does not produce external network flow, very ideal. A Web site can use these things to fight, to complete their services, to focus on their specific business and customers, they can not because of technology monopoly competition barriers, there is no need for technology to invest too much resources.

In China, which is not yet Amazon, the service may require several roles to work together.

In fact, the Internet's characteristic is that once a thing is popularized to a certain extent, it should be free. Then earn money by adding value to the service above. This is also an inevitable trend.

The wolf said a good analogy: "The combination of bandwidth and the right software is like a intel+ms alliance." I think so.