GigaVox Audio Lite: Web Services in the Wild

Technometria is fast becoming one of my favorite podcasts every week. I like to say it’s “like The Gillmor Gang, but actually good”.

This week’s episode is one of the best yet. It’s a conversation with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations/GigaVox Media and Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelism at Amazon. They discuss Amazon’s suite of web services tools they’re now offering to businesses and individuals on an on-demand basis. They include the Simple Queue Service, Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud.

Doug Kaye, early to the Web Services scene with his great primer on the subject (Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services), has become a power user of Amazon’s services by building the upcoming GigaVox Audio Lite media platform almost completely on them. He discusses the amazing ability to fire up new instances of audio processing servers on-demand as the need arises to create a platform that will infinitely scale as new customers are added. Take a look at his diagram for how he’s putting all of these separate pieces together for this system.

My mind started racing while listening to this episode. The possibilities for using web services like this are practically endless, and this example does a great job of showing off what can be built without having to invest tons of cash into servers and infrastructure.