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.
Questions many people don’t ask:
- Besides me, who has access to my data?
- Does Microsoft / Amazon have access to my corporate secrets?
- What is the hosting providers SLA?
Do I think the systems are ready for prime time? I think the whole system is in puberty at the moment. I am personally not keen on the whole concept until the system matures and my concerns are met. I have worked in IT for 10 yrs, so I think my opinion has some clout. I am optimistic though that this’ll push development of free alternatives that people can put together now for little money. I have used and built virtual infrastructures for very little money that have utilized these apps:
- Xen server from Citrix
- VMware ESXi
- Enomaly – A free cloud computing platform that I have used.
In terms of costs for doing it yourself, don’t listen to the people who say, “It’s too expensive and not cost effective to do it yourself”. Some of that is hog wash. It’s really what you’re doing. If you’re plan is to just host a simple website in a Apache environment, then host it with someone, but if you need to setup 15 workstations for users, why not consider a virtual environment with thin terminals? You can build your own SAN for pretty cheap money. Projects like OpenFiler and FreeNAS enable you to build an NFS/iSCSI based SAN that any of those virtual platforms will use. OpenFiler can cluster with another box for redundancy (a little complicated to setup), and there are products that’ll cluster FreeNAS. Trunk a mess of cheap gigabit network ports together and viola, you have a fairly fast virtual infrastructure for little money.
Anyhow food for thought… 
July 20th, 2009 on 11:02 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_grid
July 21st, 2009 on 8:42 am
I didn’t include Sun’s offering in my listing for a few reasons:
- They can only run apps that’ll run on Solaris 10, which is few and far between. Maybe some proprietary CRM / Line of business app like NxTrend.
- They have a 10 gig limit on your app.
- Their CPU based billing is interesting, but the limited number of apps you can run here is what kills it for most people.
I am not saying Sun isn’t cool. They’ve had some cool stuff, but they’re “cloud” offering isn’t what I see people really wanting. There is no big push for Solaris adoption right now.
Now virtual machine based cloud computing *is* the future IMHO. Right now it’s just cost prohibitive for SMBs unless their app needs a large number of resources. Not to mention, like I said, the technology needs to mature. 6 hrs of downtime with absolutely nothing you can do about it?
July 22nd, 2009 on 11:06 am
I think an interesting nook is the niche Sun has hit, universities and megacorps (dow, pfiezer, etc) that need to crunch a few skazillion numbers, need to do it in less then a week, and dont have the cash to buy a cray. Its more of a “push some math” service then a “host your goodies” service, though I think they certainly have gained the expertise to host a “host your goodies” service at some point.
I agree totally that this all needs to mature. At the moment, I’d be scared shiftless of a “host your goodies” service that didnt include some form of on-site “offline” version that could be referenced locally in the event of an upstream outage or whatever.
*shrugs* we’ll see what the landscape looks like in a few years I suppose.