The Origins and Future of Distributed Computing and Clouds - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 461

B.4 The Second Web Era (2003-2010)
Inthehistoryofcomputing,everyjumpinimprovedcostledtoawaveofnewapplications.
Distributed computing's better economics was one such leap. Web services that had previ-
ouslyfailed,unabletomakeaprofit,werenowcheapertooperateandgotasecondchance.
Availability Requirements
As before, companies that conducted business entirely over the Internet typically aimed at
a global audience of Internet users. That meant that they required 24 × 7 availability with
no scheduled downtime, and as close to no un scheduled downtime as possible. Companies
started applying the newly developed distributed computing techniques to their service of-
ferings to meet these availability requirements in a more cost-effective way.
Technology
Many companies embraced distributed computing techniques. Google adopted the tech-
niquestoprovidewebsearchthatwasfasterthaneverseenbefore.Previouslywebsearches
took many seconds and sometimes minutes or hours to show search results. Google was so
proud of its ability to return results in less than half a second that it listed the number of
milliseconds your request took to process at the bottom of every page.
New advertising systems like Google AdSense, which collects pennies per click, could
be profitable now that the cost of computing was significantly cheaper. Earlier business
models that involved selling advertising on a web site required huge sales forces to get ad-
vertisers to buy ads on their web site. AdSense and similar systems were fully automated.
Potential advertisers would bid in a huge, online auction for ad placement. This reduced
and often eliminated the need for a sales force. All the company needed to do was add
some JavaScript code to its site. Soonthe advertisements would start appearing and money
would start rolling in. Such advertising systems created a new business model that enabled
the development of entire new industries.
Webhostingbecamemuchcheaper.Thesoftwaregotmucheasiertouse.Thisledtothe
invention of “blogs” (originally from the term “web-log”), which required very little tech-
nical knowledge to operate. Rather than needing a sales force and a large IT department, a
singlepersoncouldrunasuccessfulblog.Bloggerscouldfocusoncreatingcontentandthe
advertising network would send them checks.