Almost lost in all of the twittering about Twitter's twubbles last week (sorry CrazyBob, couldn't resist that one!), was the unintentionally quiet announcement of the "Spring Application Platform" (more official posts here and here from springsource).

Yesterday we talked about whether Twitter really ever need to be reliable or not ... some said yes, others contend that it's not necessary.

It's been bugging me for awhile that something this popular ... and Twitter is so ... just keels over as often as it does.

A few outages ago I wondered aloud whether Twitter was taking the whole business of failure somewhat casually (triggered by some comments Blaine Cook made at SXSW).

Blaine replied with some great points, including

For the record, saying that the press surrounding the downtimes was a plus was a joke. Downtime is never good, and you should do everything you can to avoid it. However, it's a misrepresentation to say that you can build something successful without any downtime.

...

For the past year+ there have been many indicators that fundamental changes in the enterprise software development market are well underway. In particular, it sure seemed like the monolithic predominance of traditional JEE app servers was starting to break up.

I'd like to propose a simple thought experiment. Consider this question:

What if computing is free?

While we're at it, assume that scale is always sufficient for the problem at hand, latency is acceptable, your applications always work, and that operations are cheap enough to be in the noise.

What's the Point?

The point of this is simple enough. One answer to this thought experiment was Google ... and that worked out pretty well.

Awhile back Nikita Ivanov (gridgain) did a couple of posts on creating compute clouds out of Android mobile devices. Like most compute-oriented grid guys before him, he views just about any cloud as a source of cycles. After all, what choice do you have when all you can do is schedule fairly chunky work, without much assurance of when and where it'll execute?

I often spend time with startups that are interested in building really successful, great big and hugely profitable companies. Thinking big thoughts from the beginning ...

One of the things that these guys see in the fabric is an opportunity to cleanly scale as they gain customers. Rather than living with the limitations of traditional architectures, these guys figure to start right from the beginning.

I Mean Full Service

Now I should point out when I say I work with guys like this, well I mean exactly that.

Sometimes you can try to overload a few too many points into a phase, and instead of something useful you end up with a kind of 20-thought-idea-pile-up.

So I am awarding a Mad Kitty to myself for yesterday's headline on the post about floating data centers.

Now for something completely different ... startup IDS is pitching floating data centers. Some good discussion on the topic here and here.

One of my favorite parts of the role that Nicholas Carr is playing as an observer of modern computing culture, and a fomenter of useful change, is not so much what he has to say - and I think he says a lot of very insightful, very useful things - but what he triggers other people to say, think, and perhaps do.

At the very least, Carr certainly makes the conversation in our industry far more interesting.