Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else.
All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS.
It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.
The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs.
However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs.
You say that as if MapReduce is the only thing you can do with Hadoop. It has a key/value datastore too, and since recently a relational database:
Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.
All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS.
It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.