ON ALLEVIATING WEB 2.0 INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGE WITH P2P CONTRIBUTION

COME TOGETHER...RIGHT NOW

Writing yesterday's post on the coming infrastructure challenges and investments needs for the consumer web services being driven by Web 2.0 trends, reminded me of one of the topics discussed at the Union Square Ventures sessions a couple of days ago.

Specifically, the agenda on the Peer Production discussion asked:

"Are the peers always producers or can they contribute other resources like disk space or bandwidth?"

One way the consumer online portals like Google, Yahoo!, MSN et al will likely be able to alleviate the infrastructure demands of the dozens of storage and processing intensive web services coming up, is by employing variations on today's P2P (peer-to-peer) technologies.

Technologies like BitTorrent are alleviating the massive bandwidth requirements in downloading videos over the internet by employing P2P architectures.  Using similar technologies and approaches, we can likely address SOME of the challenges ahead by leveraging the tens and hundreds of millions of hard drives and CPUs of users using some of these services.

Another popular service that also leverages P2P architecture is Skype, soon to be part of eBay.  Whenever a consumer downloads the Skype internet telephony application, and rapidly clicks on the "I agree" button the its terms of service, he/she is also agreeing, knowingly or not, to make available the PC in question to facilitate the routing of Skype calls by other Skype users TO other Skype users.

P2P approaches as a result, will have a big impact on the infrastructure solutions going forward.

What's also interesting is that EVEN WITH the use of P2P architectures, some industry observers note that at times almost HALF the traffic on the internet backbones is comprised of Bittorrent traffic.  Imagine what it would be WITHOUT the use of P2P technologies.

P2P applications altogether are estimated to have accounted for 60% of all internet traffic last year, as this piece in IT Week explains.

Web 2.0 is not just about people working together, but their PCs working together as well.  The machine to machine traffic is likely to be as important as the people to people traffic we measure today in terms of email, IMs (instant messages) and the like.

It's truly going to be an "All for one, One for All" kind of world out there.

Comments

[vibhanshu]

do you have any idea about distributed systems or distributed computing??
please send me some articles

[vibhanshu]

do you have any idea about distributed systems or distributed computing??
please send me some articles