Last week I put up a post about how AOL.com has 25% of all traffic now running through our MicroDC infrastructure. There was a great follow up post by James LaPlaine our VP of Operations on his blog Mental Effort, which goes into even greater detail. While many of the email inquiries I get have been based around the technology itself, surprisingly a large majority of the notes have been questions around how to make your software. applications, and development efforts ready for such an infrastructure and what the timelines for realistically doing so would be.
The general response of course is that it depends. If you are a web-based platform or property focused solely on Internet based consumers, or a firm that needs diversified presence in different regions without the hefty price tag of renting and taking down additional space this may be an option. However many of the enterprise based applications have been written in a way that is highly dependent upon localized infrastructure, short application based latency, and lack adequate scaling. So for more corporate data center applications this may not be a great fit. It will take sometime for those big traditional application firms to be able to truly build out their infrastructure to work in an environment like this (they may never do so). I suspect most will take an easier approach and try to ‘cloudify’ their own applications and run it within their own infrastructure or data centers under their control. This essentially will allow them to control the access portion of users needs, but continue to rely on the same kinds of infrastructure you might have in your own data center to support it. Its much easier to build a web based application which then connects to a traditional IT based environment, than to truly build out infrastructure capable of accommodating scale. I am happy to continue answer questions as they come up, but as I had an overwhelming response of questions about this I thought I would throw something quick up here that will hopefully help.
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LooseBolts 