In an associated post, I have written about the state of utility computing for large corporations. Massive vendor delivery capacity in place, and companies starting to accept vanilla services but many vendors still selling customized services, not utilities.
I saw a dramatically different POV in start up world when Charlie Wood recently needed a quick computing boost as he launched a beta product.
How quick? "So tomorrow morning I'll be looking to beef up our infrastructure in a big way. I don't have time to comparison shop"
Now Charlie is a fellow Irregular, and I saw emails flying in our group with all kinds of suggestions. Have you tried amazon EC2 and S3? How about Sun Grid? Would Joyent work? Is Marten Mickos's big database in the sky ready?
In the end, his incumbent hosting vendor ServerBeach stepped up to support him, but the speed of response - and the speed at which utility product offerings are appearing to support start up needs is fascinating. Now imagine if the bigger vendors with their 2 petabytes of storage and other economies got really serious about utility computing.
