Archive for July, 2009
Cloud computing and you….
by CmdrFenix on Jul.15, 2009, under General
So there is a lot of talk about cloud computing being the next big thing since sliced bread. For non-IT people, this is where you host your server as a virtual machine on some hosting providers network. Your server is effectively out there on the Internet hosted on some server, somewhere you’ve never been, by someone you’ve never met. If you think that scares you, it scares a lot of people. Amazon EC2 is one of the more popular, but even Microsoft is getting in on the action. The benefits are huge in the sense of scalable hardware and redundant infrastructure, but with everything out there, nothing is fool proof.
All of the current systems by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been plagued with many unexplained outages and some that shouldn’t have happened. Imagine your server being down for 6 hours and you have absolutely nothing you can do about it. If it was at a collocation center or under your control at least you might have some options, but with this model, you are at the hosting providers complete mercy. Honestly for many, this is a scary prospect.
(continue reading…)
