happy chaos freedom machine

 Virtualization is hot (or was, until VMWare’s stock took a beating — nevermind, it’s still hot in IT departments, where it counts), Web 2.0 is hot, and “Cloud computing” is hot. Together these trends must be sending cold chills down the collective spines of the giants of the IT industry.  This article on Forbes.com captures the challenge to the dominant business model.

Faced with a massive computational job, Zillow.com turns to Amazon’s EC2 service instead of buying their own servers and deploying commercial software. Instead of spending millions and taking 6 months to deploy the system and complete the job, they took 3 months and spent $50,000. They turned on 500 virtual servers in Amazon’s cloud, presumably installed their favorite LAMP stack on them, and cranked it up. The economic implication is a giant below-the-waterline hole in the S.S. Enterprise IT.