Web 2.0 Infrastructure

I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo earlier today to participate in a panel on next generation web 2.0 platforms and how the hardware, software and network infrastructure would evolve.  The panel had a diverse crowd ranging from a Microsoft dude who had experience with 1,000+ server scale-out scenarios, a networking appliance guru from Crescendo Networks, one of the guys from Amazon's EC2 web services initiative and the moderator Alistair Croll from Coradiant who is a serious data center infrastructure and performance management wiz. Being a software guy, it had a bit more hardware / networking focus than I'm used to. 

As much as we might want to see the evolution of data centers to be managed "in the sky" I think we'll continue to see a mixed environment for a long time.  By mixed environment, I mean hosted software as a service co-existing with in-house deployments as well as open source co-existing with closed source.  The reality is, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for all companies or even necessarily within a single company. 

We had a decent crowd, I think somewhere around 400 people, and some good questions from the audience.  The most amazing thing was that this was one of 6 different tracks taking place at the same time and there were over 3,000 paid attendees at the conference and several thousand more for the tradeshow expo and keynotes.  Wow.  It's also clear that open source has become the default infrastructure for web 2.0. 

We'll have more discussions about how open source scales out the web 2.0 applications at the MySQL user conference next week.  If you're a late registrant, ping me if you want to get the discount code.