Some days ago, we finished the migration of our production site to the Cloud, more precisely to Amazon EC2. I do not know if the “Cloud Computing” needs defining, but in any case I invite you to watch this wonderful video made by the people of Salesforce.com, in which you can find an easy and intuitive definition of Cloud Computing, and a list of its benefits.

What benefits does provide the Cloud to a search engine like novo|seek offer? I am probably going to repeat most of the same arguments listed in the video, anyhow:

• Cost reduction: in the Cloud we pay for what we use: CPU time, storage, bandwidth…
• Easy scaling: for a growing search engine like novo|seek, scalability is critical. For us, the user experience is very important and thus the QoS (Quality of Service).  Dimensioning the servers of an emerging web site is a hard task. If you get short, any marketing or PR action that drives a lot of traffic to the site can get the servers down on their knees.  On the contrary, if you over-dimension your infrastructures, you will have your servers getting old inside your data center. Amazon EC2 let us re-dimension our production infrastructure at the same time our traffic grows.
• Reduction of the Time-to-market and the entry barriers to innovation: The EC2 infrastructure lets us create new server instances fast and easily  with different sizes and performance. If we need to try new text mining algorithms or expand our technology to new data sources, the Cloud will allow us to instantiate all the required servers to meet our extra computing power and we can forget about finding new room in our crowded data center. Cloud computing lowers the innovation entry barriers to small and medium size companies like us.

We know that we are not the only Company in the sector to take advantage of Cloud Computing, BioTeam, for example, is adapting bioinformatics solutions so it can be run in Amazon EC2.

Not only small and medium companies are in The Cloud, big pharmas like Jonhson&Johnson or Lilly, are developing their first projects on EC2 although a recent report from McKinsey stated that Cloud Computing will not reduce costs to large corporations.

The novo|seek team is sure that moving to The Cloud will improve the quality of the service that we are currently providing, and will let us bring to all of you the innovative features cooking right know at our R&D department.

Greetings from the cloud!