Hybrid Web Cluster has been a long time in the making, and now it’s finally getting close to being demonstrable. You can’t imagine how excited that makes me.
I think we’ve got a genuinely revolutionary product here — a web cluster that takes the headache away for anyone who’s running a bunch of web servers — and I can’t wait to show it to the world.
There was a time a little while ago that I thought that cloud computing would eclipse us. We’re such a small company with limited resources, I felt that the giants of Amazon, Google and Rackspace would be impossible to compete with.
But then I realised we can use them. Instead of trying to compete directly with any one of these companies, our product can run on top of their infrastructure, taking advantage of all their investment in hardware and their massive management systems which keep their “infrastructure clouds” running. We can even run one cluster across all three — one server on EC2, one on Rackspace, and one on, say, ElasticHosts. All you need is a decent internet connection between these separate data centres and the cluster will automatically cope with the failure of, say, all of EC2. And all that with the level of complexity and configuration that your receptionist could do through her web browser. Now that’s something.
You could — through our web interface — spin up instances on all three of these networks, and also manually download and configure the software on, say, three of your own servers. You can tell Hybrid Web Cluster through our web interface that these 6 servers together make up a single cluster, and they’ll go away and join themselves up as a single logical entity.
This is what people mean when they talk about a “hybrid cloud” — a hybrid of local and remote “cloud” hardware working together. But you can’t imagine how complex a proposition that would be to most technical people. Suddenly we’ve got a solution which we can deploy in a matter of minutes, and with no technical expertise at all. (Although you’ll need to know how to boot our install CD and set up some IP addresses if you want to run a local machine as part of one of your clusters).
So an exciting time ahead! Let’s hope we can get some momentum, both within the open-source community and with potential customers.
