Amazon + Two Guys + $0 = Next YouTube

Utility computing and storage is changing the way web services are built.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordable:

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred (cheap bandwidth makes this possible)

The next YouTube will be built on Amazon’s Web Services by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0 (see SmugBlog). Amazon S3 now has 5 billion objects stored in it. What's more, it had 920 million S3 requests on its peak day, and 16,607 requests in its peak second (see ReadWriteWeb).

Sun Microsystems offers Utility Computing @ network.com for $1/CPU-hr.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordabe at $0.10/instance-hour! It is in limited beta but already popular.

Google has many assets and APIs related to utility computing. All kind of data can be stored in Google Base. Their web-scale distributed computing platform is well known. This paper on the Google Filesystem gives us a peek into the future of Web applications and platforms.

Who will build the next YouTube on these utility computing platforms?