The Problem of Scale

The GigaOM Structure conference took place this week, and one of the issues addressed was the need for companies to look at how to scale their information infrastructures. From a GigaOM post covering one of the conference panels:

“Facebook’s VP of technical operations, Jonathan Heiliger, said one thing the company has found as it’s grown to more than 400 million users is that whenever it predicts that demand for a new feature or service will be really high, it isn’t, and ‘when we predict it will be really low, it turns out to be really high.’”

Getting a new online business, or service, or product feature off the ground is fraught with difficulties, but the hardest component may be predicting user demand, and therefore preparing the appropriate resources. Hence the appeal of both cloud services, and the more narrowly defined category of Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). For most companies, it makes more sense to rely on resources available on-demand, than it does to place big bets on how, when, and where an offering may become popular.

If you look at information resource needs as a layer cake, the bottom layer is the infrastructure, the next layer is the delivery platform, and the top layer is the user-facing application. You need scale at every level. With infrastructure, you need storage and processing power to accommodate not only a certain volume of data, but demand for it in different locations around the world. The delivery platform needs scale to be able to adapt to changing user requirements, including access across new CE devices, and new software systems. The application level needs scale to give you the flexibility to continue improving the user experience – whether that improvement means better, more sophisticated ad targeting, or the ability to personalize online content and services.

Scalability is hardly a new concept, but applying it to an online business model is still a relatively new phenomenon, particularly in light of evolving user expectations, and the need for global distribution.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 11:53 am and is filed under Cloud, Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.