A relatively new development in Web technology is the appearance of hosted storage services like Amazon S3, OmniDrive, and Box.net. Instead of writing your application to a RAID drive or a storage area network (SAN), your data is hosted by your provider in their data center, typically on a truly massive SAN. You get an API to access your online storage programmatically over the Web, and virtually unlimited storage space to use. You pay as you go, typically by the gigabyte, and the difference to your application is practically neglible.
If you need lots of storage for your app, you have two choices: a SAN, or use online storage. A SAN will be faster, because it’s local, and online storage will be much cheaper and easier to maintain. If you can devise a caching system to sit in front of the hosted storage you can have the best of both worlds.
Add hosted storage on top of cloud computing, and you can pretty much host your entire application in the cloud now, and scale at will. When you think about the fact that this wouldn’t have been possible just a year ago, this is an incredibly cool development. The Internet is becoming the network and the platform.
Oh, don’t forget to use an application like Carbonite for backing up your PC online. Set it and forget it, the days of burning backups to CD’s or DVD’s are over.
Part of the 60 Ideas in 60 Days series. Click here for the rest of the ideas.
