Cloud Services and Online Media – Powering Innovation

You may not know it, but a new generation of incredibly powerful and portable interactive experiences lies in our midst, living entirely “in the cloud”. From Microsoft’s Azure to Amazon’s cloud services, the ability to use third-party “on demand”—instead of “owned”—infrastructure for clients holds the potential for cutting-edge user interactions that live completely independently of traditional website content management or hosting systems.

How did this transition come about? The increased demand for deeper engagements via social networks, widgets, and other non-traditional channels was a start. This phenomenon called into question the traditional way of building and hosting applications. While the dynamic functionality of traditional and Flash ad units had been primarily limited to parsing dynamic data sources (such as XML feeds) or leveraging simple third-party Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the current trend to create a truly distributed presence now calls for truly distributed content, along with a functional infrastructure to support it. This is especially the case with more sophisticated (i.e., visible) initiatives; such functionality cannot be supported by existing client systems. Simply put, these initiatives need to run and scale without affecting the performance of current websites, or more mission-critical back office systems and applications.

From a business perspective, the incremental cost structure of cloud computing services fits well within the existing Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) or other related fees for bought-media campaigns. Where it begins to become more of a concern, however, is on earned- and owned-media placements, where traffic can increase dramatically if a unit’s lifespan extends beyond the scope of a single campaign.

Some key advantages to utilizing cloud services includes:

· Scalability and Load Balancing – these environments are designed to satisfy hosting and application performance requirements of some of the largest web sites on the internet, and as such, they are highly reliable and, in most cases, dynamically scalable.

· Persistent Storage – the need to support incremental or ancillary data capture to support applications outside of an existing data source is real. Fortunately, cloud services are attractive for applications where managing stage or temporarily storing information would be difficult or impractical. Basically, it renders irrelevant the risk of deploying a potentially out-of-scope database infrastructure or some other method of persistence.

· Resources that Accelerate Development – leveraging existing platform components or services can help not only in the integration of scalable performance in our application, but also accelerate development based on additional components or services made available.

Here is a sampling of some of core cloud services providers:

Windows Azure

Microsoft’s entry into the space provides a comprehensive infrastructure for cloud services that can deliver on-demand computing and storage services to applications that use Microsoft’s datacenters. However, Azure is not limited to developers using the .NET technology stack; it also supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML and PHP.

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS)

The apex of the current generation of cloud services, Amazon’s initiative began with its Simple Storage Service offering, a service for storing data on excess Amazon.com infrastructure. It has since grown to a scalable, interlocking cluster of service products with increasingly more sophisticated management capabilities.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine leverages the technologies used to develop Google’s own scalable web applications; unfortunately, it offers the least amount of flexibility due to its Python language requirement (although Java is now supported). That said, it does offer a large volume of transactional traffic on a monthly basis for free.

Learning how cloud services can extend or enhance online experiences can lead to some potentially interesting and innovative solutions to classic interactive challenges, from online advertising to relationship marketing and management. Things that would have been difficult or impossible to do previously due to cost, timing, and lack of infrastructure can now be accomplished with relative ease. Get ready for a wave of distributed but deep and engaging experiences across the web.

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