Sunday, 25 February 2007
Is Amazon services perfect for the pipeline future?
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I put it to you all like this, Amazon.com are well ahead of the pipeline game. Microsoft, Google and even Yahoo have got a lot of ground to cover. So why am I saying this?
I was sitting in the crowd typing up notes and a blog post (video) for the future of webapps. And hit me, wait a second. Amazon have built a bunch of services which are totally useable remotely and could work very well in a pipeline. On top of that, they have a perfect revenue model (charging per use not a subscription cost). So you can decide to use them within a few minutes and be setup and ready to go as quickly. All you need is a Amazon account.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service - S3
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - EC2
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (Beta) - Turk
- Amazon Simple Queue Service - SQS
In the above diagram (yep I love Inkscapes new features), you have media going into an encoder. The encoder could be on your desktop or some external service. On the left you got free services like hey!watch and on the right Amazon EC2 which can be setup for encoding but at a bigger cost. Amazon EC2 would also be much quicker and more reliable that hey!watch. Depending on your needs you can choose either one. The Pay pipe would be faster and more reliable, while the Free pipe not so reliable and much slower. Once you've encoded, its a matter of where do you store the footage for viewing. Like before you can use the left hand side for free solutions or the right for costly but that reliability (good quality of service).
I had a chat with Werber Vogels after his presentation and he made it clear that the services such as S3 and EC2 could be used in a pipeline but Amazon are not interested in that end of a potential system. There expecting someone else to build that end. There only interested in providing the servers and infrustrtuction to make allow others to build systems. I did ask him if Amazon were planning to provide services on top of EC2 (for example encoding services) and S3 (like Webdav, CalDav) but he made it clear that would be left up to 3rd parties. So in my example, Hey!Watch could offer a pro version which is actually using EC2 instead of their own machines. Last of all he mentioned Amazon SQS could be potentionally very interesting for pipeline applications.
