Me.Tech()

I just read an article from the web2.0 expo where Jeff Bezos of Amazon gave a talk on how Amazons S3 service , which essentially allows you to use Amazon’s servers as your data store, crossed 2 Billion stored objects. For a meager sum of money you get the scalability and the reliability of Amazons servers, basically the same architecture Amazons own services are based on. Thats where he announced “Infrastructure as a service has arrived”

I did some research on S3 sometime back when I intended to use it for some project, and found it really compelling to use. There were lot of problems reported by users and some outages also which hampered lot of sites who depended completely on S3. There is also the problem that your traditional taxonomic structure that you were working on will now be replaced by a Hashtable like datastore that you essentially query. I found it a great way to store shared media, photos and other non text based information and rightly so. S3 fits in as a replacement to a database in the more traditional sense, but it has its own limitations, but its power nevertheless.
So what is this IAAS( see title) , according to me its the death of the network engineer.Gone are those days when you would rent our servers and rope in DBA’s and Network engg who would manage the hardware and availability part of your application. You want unlimited computational scalability? try mediaTemple’s Grid server, want unlimited datastore? try S3, want scalable content delivery? try Akamai Edge. Infrastructure management is at an all time low in the 2.0 era, especially since technology is more easily available , manageable and scalable. Infrastructure is also turning into another SOA where pre built components define how you develop and deploy your applications and you don’t have to worry about downtimes, reliability, scalability and other metrics that are considered important for any web service.
Whenever such disparate elements contribute to a unified cause the next step is  consolidation. But will it ever happen ? these service providers bank on the fact that you need these systems to run your application, otherwise you wouldn’t need a database or a blade server. Have services like S3 given companies like oracle a run for their money? Will there be a similar offering from the other majors?
Picture Oracle providing database hosting on their enterprise level infrastructure for a minimal cost. Updates and upgrades done automatically, maintenance not a pain anymore. Its a space worth debating on and worth watching out for.