As part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers and companies.
Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh
(Credit: Dan Farber)Yahoo has been building massive scale infrastructure (now known as cloud computing) for years, but the intent of the new organization is to streamline development by bringing the various people and teams working on the core technologies into a single group, according to Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh, who reports to CEO Jerry Yang.
"The primary focus for the new group is internal," Balogh said. "But much like Amazon and Google, when you have something at scale and integrated, there are opportunities to offer services." Microsoft is also expected to go down a similar path.
Balogh thinks that Yahoo can leapfrog Google and Amazon with its cloud-based, infrastructure services for internal or external use.
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"There are some more recent innovations around the cloud and grid. It's a hot topic in research," he said, maintaining that Yahoo is applying newer technology concepts from 2005 to 2007, than competitors.
Balogh mentioned open source, such as Hadoop (software for scalable, distributed computing), and new ways to implement data abstraction as differentiators, as well as "loosening ACID requirements (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, which are a set of properties that guarantee reliable database transactions).
Balogh said that Yahoo's global fabric foundation will have self-healing capabilities that allow it to "operate at a higher level of availability with fewer people than we understand others have."
Besting Microsoft, Google and Amazon in optimizing cloud computing would be a major and unanticipated win. Raghu Ramakrishnan, one of Yahoo's chief scientists, is working on Yahoo's cloud computing research efforts. Below are the principles guiding Yahoo's platform from a presentation (PDF) Ramakrishnan gave earlier this year.
(Credit:
Yahoo Research)
Update 8:25 a.m. PDT: I added a dash more detail about his next job.
Jeremy Zawodny, a programmer who helped launched the Yahoo Developer Network and worked on many other internal projects at the Internet company, said on Thursday that he's leaving for a "much smaller company."
Jeremy Zawodny
(Credit: Jeremy Zawodny)"In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge," he said in a blog post. "After 8.5 years of service, and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time for me to move on has arrived."
Zawodny was quick to say that Microsoft's machinations and Carl Icahn's agitations are unrelated to his departure. "The opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself, and it was simply too interesting to pass up," he said.
In an e-mail, he said he'd be starting work again at the end of July--"right around the time that OSCon (the Open Source Convention) starts...It's not an open-source company but they do use a lot of open source and would like to contribute more to open source."
At Yahoo, Zawodny wasn't just a behind-the-scenes coder. Projects visible to the outside world included the Yahoo Developer Network and the Yahoo Search Blog, and he was a notable promoter of open-source software such as Hadoop and a believer in openness in general.
"Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open-source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I'd have left Yahoo years ago, if I didn't see it happening," he said in March.
That philosophy aligns closely with the Yahoo Open Strategy, under which Yahoo is trying to make itself an open foundation for others' Web-based applications and to expose some of its inner workings for use by other Web sites.
This is a fascinating read from Baseline. I heard a bit about Hadoop and other Doug Cutting Lucene projects during a session at the O'Reilly Executive Radar session of OSCON last month. Hadoop is "an open-source project that aims to replicate Google's techniques for storing and processing large amounts of data distributed across hundreds or thousands of commodity PCs."
Sounds juicy, doesn't it? Especially in Yahoo's hands.
Tim O'Reilly gets this move exactly right: Yahoo is using open source in the Web 2.0 world in the same way that HP and other traditional software companies have used it in the packaged software world:
As a club to undermine competitors while blessing customers and developers.
O'Reilly writes:
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