The domain of cloud computing is known for its instant scalability and flexibility. However, cloud technologies have gone through a lengthy process of evolution before transforming into the optimal architecture we are familiar with now.
What is Web Scale IT?
In broad terms, we can define Web Scale IT as all those complex processes and protocols that enable Cloud Service Providers (CSP) like dinCloud to offer instant scalability and deployment to users over a cloud infrastructure.
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How Web Scale IT Differs from Traditional IT?
To better understand Web Scale IT, we first need to understand a traditional model of delivering IT based services. The foremost enabling factor in a traditional IT environment is the underlying physical hardware that will manage all those processes.
In the Traditional IT Model, instant scalability is simply just not possible. Before you can scale up, you first need to assess and often times, enhance the underlying hardware resources before this can be achieved.
The flip side of a traditional IT delivery model is equally inefficient. When your infrastructure related needs shrink for whatever reasons, you are still heavily invested in the physical IT hardware that was procured to scale up in the first place.
Key Characteristics of Web Scale IT
On the other hand, web scale IT revolves around leveraging the internet for providing various IT resources such as storage, compute and processing. By virtualizing the various components of this delivery model, you become equipped with instant scalability.
Also Read:
- Cloud Computing Benefits for the Healthcare Sector
- Cloud Adoption by Higher Education Providers Expected to Soar
- Cloud Industry Outlook Between 2020 and 2024
Here are a few defining characteristics of a web scale IT architecture that bring efficiencies and flexibility in the delivery of IT services.
Scalability
In the case of web scale IT, scalability can be achieved almost in real time. As all the underlying resources are virtualized, you can scale your architecture up or down in the shortest time span, without procuring any additional physical IT hardware.
Consistency
With web scale IT, you are mostly replicating homogenous IT resources such as virtual desktops, virtual servers or virtual databases. In this way, not only is your underlying hardware highly compatible, but also the services that are delivered over it.
Tolerance
One of the defining characteristics of web scale IT is a high tolerance architecture. As this model is delivered over the web and originates from virtualized resources, they can instantly be enhanced by leveraging the vast capacity of powerful data centers.
Versioning
This is yet another area where web scale IT outperforms the traditional model of delivering IT services. In the traditional model, version mismatches can lead to serious compatibility issues and also poses other risks such as data loss.
Web scale IT services, such as the ones offered by dinCloud, generally don’t run into such bottlenecks. As the IT resources are both virtualized and centralized, the need for updating individual physical machines is eliminated and all this is performed centrally.
Software Defined Storage
One of the main advantages of web scale IT is Software Defined Storage (SDS) that cloud providers can easily avail. This enables companies like dinCloud to virtually segregate vast storage resources in their data centers into multiple chunks of virtual storage.
This virtualized storage is managed by software and can be systematically allocated to hundreds or even thousands of individual cloud users. This results in optimal utilization of storage resources that’s much more efficient than the traditional IT model of storage.
SDS greatly reduces the cost and administrative challenges of maintaining physical storage resources for each end point device. In this way, a single well equipped cloud data center can serve the storage needs of millions of users or terabytes of data.
Conclusion
We can consider web scale IT as a key enabler of delivering cloud powered services such as storage or processing. This technology has made it possible to migrate from the physical IT infrastructure at the enterprise level to Fully Virtualized Architectures over the cloud.
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