From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 55

Apple backed off from iWeb, its customers needing applications to design
websites and a host to serve them were left out of the cloud and in the
cold. Unlike that of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, Apple's business
presence is felt only in hardware sales. These are admittedly substantial,
but there has been little crossover from hardware into platforms, applica-
tions, and services. As one review maintained, “While iCloud, again, is
awesome for personal use, businesses will ind themselves better served
by a terminal server parked in a secure data center, VPN [virtual private
network] access to a corporate server, or another cloud-based ile sharing
solution that ensures only authorized users securely access corporate data”
(Eckel 2012). In other words, customers will continue to shop the cloud
at AWS, Google, Microsoft, or one of the other cloud business-service
companies like Rackspace.
Facebook is also a major player in the cloud computing industry but,
like Apple, it uses the cloud to service the gargantuan needs of its own
site, which includes about 1.3 billion users. The company learned about
cloud computing the hard way when in 2006 its computers came close to
literally melting down. At that time Facebook was renting a small space
in Santa Clara, California, and illed it with the racks of servers needed
to store and process activity on its members' accounts. When electricity
powering the growing system overheated critical components, the chief
engineer and a few staff headed to a local pharmacy and bought every
electric fan in the store. The fans worked, the servers were saved, and the
rest, as they say, is history. The company had 10 million subscribers at the
time and would not have reached anything close to the billion-plus mem-
bers who upload 300 million photos a day if it failed to master the cloud
(Glanz 2012b). Today, all those photos amount to 7 petabytes of data
each month, and a cloud server system that calibrates storage conditions,
including temperature, by calculating the likelihood that members will
access information and photos. For example, colder storage slows retrieval
time, but that works ine for the billion photos a day uploaded around
Halloween that members are unlikely to want to retrieve after the costumes
are put away for another year. These issues are challenging, but Facebook
beneits from keeping all of its data needs in house. As a result, the key
pressures facing any cloud provider or user, such as sharing, securing, and
syncing, are more easily addressed by Facebook than by companies that
are in the business of serving thousands of different businesses.