I posted yesterday on this topic, but the news keeps coming. EMC, the global enterprise storage giant, annouced today they had acquired Pi Corp, a relatively unknown startup, specializing in cloud technology and services. EMC has also formalized a new cloud division, and hired Microsoft veteran Paul Martiz to lead it.

That makes 2 of the biggest players in their respective segments of the infrastructure technology space jump headfirst into cloud computing, all within the past 2 days. Is the cloud trend here to stay, you betcha.

I’ve already written about cloud computing and some of the reasons why I think it is a game changer, forever altering how we look and utilize web hosting (for the better). It looks like Rackspace believes the same, as evidenced by their annoucement yesterday that Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary, will now offer cloud computing similar to Amazon Web Services. Specific product offering and pricing can be viewed by clicking on the image below:

It’s encouraging to see more players, especially industry leaders, jumping into this space along with Amazon. The result will be increased innovation, competition, and a more mature cloud computing offering. All of which benefit their customers. As the Mosso slogan says, it’s time to “Code, load and go.”

I read a presentation today that covered the challenges businesses face when scaling their web properties as they become more successful. It was originally written and presented by John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace IT Hosting. It’s a good explanation of the various stages of growth that online businesses go through and the associated issues that come along the way. There are some mentions of best practices and good recommendations included as well. These are tried and true methods that Rackspace and John have gleaned from their extensive experience with high traffic customers.

You can download the entire presentation in PDF format by clicking here.

The problems outlined in the presentation are well documented and prevalent across the web hosting industry….TODAY. However, with the emergence of on-demand hosting by leveraging cloud computing, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Simple DB, are many of these challenges still relevant? At the very least on their way to becoming irrelevant in the near future.

As a site owner, if you decide to host with Amazon, you don’t face the horizontal scaling issues that come with traditional web hosting. Those problems are taken out of the equation for you by Amazon. Need more hosting horsepower? Add another server in minutes. That type of horizontal hardware scaling can, and often does, take many days in the traditional web hosting model. Cloud computing is not currently without flaws, but these will be worked out over time. For now, the benefits far outweigh the risks when compared to the traditional web hosting model when looking at it from a scalability perspective.

I’ve been closely following Amazon’s progress with AWS, Amazon Web Services, for some time now. Many of the services they offer, the Simple Storage Service in particular, have grown rapidly as a popular choice for many web startups and companies seeking a cheaper storage alternative to their own datacenters. In fact, some colleagues of mine have moved forward with putting their entire technology platform inside the Amazon computing cloud.

All of the momentum behind Amazon S3 came to a screeching halt today when customers experienced a service failure that lasted for 2 hours.

Many Amazon customers and technologists through the blogosphere have reacted with outrage and harsh criticism of Amazon over the issue. While it is certainly disruptive and unfortunate, the risk of an outage like this is one of the trade-offs you take on with the benefits of using S3. As of this writing, Amazon’s S3 SLA only guarantees 99.9% uptime. That, coupled with the fact that commercial cloud computing on this scale is still in its infancy almost sets the stage for these issues.

That said, I don’t believe this will be anything more than a temporary black eye to Amazon. They will continue to improve, innovate and optimize the service reliability. Adding monitoring tools and providing visibility into the system’s health data will probably also come.

Are you using any of Amazon Web Services? Would this recent service failure deter you from using them? Send me your thoughts.