NoSQL as a service
By Andy Ormsby
11 Apr 2011
Category:
Business Insights
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Technical Articles
Is there room in the Cloud for NoSQL? Is the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market saturated already?
According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, Cloud Computing is at the peak of inflated expectations. Just about every hosting company and service provider seems to have relabelled its offerings as “cloud” and people have been talking and writing about the imminent bursting of the cloud bubble for at least a couple of years.
Amazon did a great job of bringing IaaS to the masses; EC2 works well for many people and there are plenty of companies building a support infrastructure that makes it even easier to use. But they are hardly the only company in the space. The recent Gartner “Magic Quadrant” for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting (December 2010) lists 18 service providers, and these are just those big enough and lucky (or unlucky) enough to appear on Gartner’s radar. There is no shortage of other contenders.
As GigaOM suggests, any new entrants to the IaaS world are going to have to provide something more than just another VM hosting shop. So how can a service provider differentiate themselves in a crowded noisy market?
‘Platform’ not ‘Infrastructure’
If Infrastructure as a Service is crowded, one obvious step for these providers is to move up the value chain, providing a managed platform (for example as Amazon is doing with RDS), and what more suitable platform to offer in a world of exponentially increasing data than a NoSQL database service?
Many of the architectural features of NoSQL databases, designed to support global deployment a la Google, are well suited to play with the constraints and opportunities that Cloud services present: NoSQL DBs scale elastically, with new nodes being added to a cluster with ease; they are tolerant of inconsistencies, failure, latency and network partition, which are all unavoidable in the public Cloud domain.
Amazon has its SimpleDB offering, and recently we’ve also seen hosted CouchDB (Cloudant) and MongoDB (MongoHQ). But we have not yet come across any organisations offering Cassandra as a service. It seems likely there should be demand: at Acunu we have come across plenty of people running Cassandra on Amazon’s EC2.
So where are the Cassandra as a Service providers? An elastic, multi-tenant Cassandra service sounds pretty appealing to me. We would certainly be interested in talking to service providers who are looking at putting something like this together. We might even be able to help!
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