Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars 114
fdicostanzo writes "The folks at Mixpanel are leaving Rackspace's server cloud for Amazon and have left a little note about their reasons. There's been some talk that Rackspace's offering has not been up to snuff once you scale. Analysis suggests that Rackspace's offering still has some advantages however."
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It would be great if there were some cloud provider (or other name if you like), actually providing the services for VMs that we've had for years for physical machines on our desk :
-> screen access without propietary .exe (and not-windows-only) (why not via pure javascript ?)
-> a way to unplug-replug-reconfigure network
I mean even things like terramark don't provide this very basic service. Amazon is cute, if you don't mind rewriting everything in your business from scratch. And google, well Google Ap
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Yes Google App Engine is a good example of true cloud computing. Say what you want about the limitations, but it is cloud computing.
Saying Google App Engine makes Amazon look flexible is nonsense. Apples and oranges. The upside of App Engine is that it really is cloud computing, so you actually get all of the benefits that we keep hearing about.
How could Google have done it differently and pleased you? How could they not have approved languages, when they needed to modify them to make them cloud capable? Do
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Well, that's great and all, but if that is cloud computing, then why am I supposed to be interested ?
I want a "server in the cloud", that works preferably just like a server on my desk, except with a faster internet connection and better cooling etc.
But it still needs to do things like letting me see it's screen, replug, reconfigure the network, add/remove disks, ...
The advantages of the cloud would be :
-> ridiculous disk sizes possible (and for-rent - no capital cost)
-> no capital investment
-> som
Re:cloud vs VM (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can tell, what you're looking for is just virtual hosting, with a few specific requirements. I would think you could find all of those requirements, although I'll concede that a lot of options available today kind of suck.
"Cloud Computing" in my understanding is in fact all about the automatic scaling. I want to do a proof of concept online, and then show it to a few potential clients. I want it to basically be turned off when I'm not using it, and scale up quickly if my clients start hammering it. I only want to pay for what gets used. If I'm not using it, sell that capacity to somebody else, and keep my costs down.
If your're a full-fledged business, and you want responsiveness, and you want to guarantee a certain level of service to your clients, then cloud hosting may not be the best bet, or even the cheapest. You could still use it for special cases though. I heard a neat example: this guy needed to convert several million images into thumbnails. He wrote a little service to do it, hosted it in the cloud, let it scale way up, and churned through all the images in a few days, and it cost him a few hundred bucks on his corporate credit card. The time and expense to set up dedicated servers for this one-off task would have been ridiculous.
Like every damn thing in computer science (and really, life) cloud computing is not the solution to all of our problems, and it's also not a complete waste of time. It's a useful tool, to be used when appropriate.
Ooo! Car analogy! If you commute every day by car, you should probably buy a car. If you take the train to work and just need the car for the occasional trip to Target, then a car-sharing service might work for you.
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Well then "cloud computing" is simply a return to the mainframe world of old and nothing more.
A few new API's, a bigger network, somewhat better tools (thank God ! All the devils in hell couldn't make tools less useful than the old unisys mainframes - too cruel)
And of course it retains all the old downsides to mainframe computing - inflexible in the extreme (like GAE) - everything is payable, metered - huge infrastructure costs for everyone involved - totally dependant on access to centralized infrastructur
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In the case of GAE "the server" is thousands upon thousands of small servers, not a giant mainframe that rests in a single
By the middle of the mainframe era the same could be said about mainframes. You even had worldwide-distributed mainframes.
One thing though : their database features blew what GAE provides out of the water in terms of consistency guarantees (even if not in speed. Then again, that was 20 years ago).
If I wanted to run weather simulations, perhaps even serious number crunching on my Facebook data, etc. etc. I might rent space out of the cloud instead of provisioning physical servers in my network. If you're doing anything at the scale
I seriously doubt things like Amazon or GAE will beat even small compute clusters available at universities, both in max. capacity and (especially) price, you know, the data crunchers specially designed for the tas
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Sorry about replying to my own post, but unless I'm mistaken the main reason GNU was started was to get away from these big (networked) mainframe installations and the hyper-clunky and hyper-propriatary nature of their available tools. Certainly today's cloud systems have the same problem.
Apparently they had the same downsides as today's cloud services. Data goes in fine - but it doesn't come out again.
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I seriously doubt things like Amazon or GAE will beat even small compute clusters available at universities
That was true until recently - Amazon now has "HPC" capabilities. [amazon.com] While not extremely impressive (yet?), you can indeed rapidly beat out any small compute cluster at a university now - at a fraction of the cost, too. Now instead of having a cluster that takes weeks to give you results, takes lots of man-hours to build and maintain, and spends only part of it's time being used...you can spin up (in mi
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Amazon's "HPC" capabilities don't measure up to even a small university compute cluster. You can get 64 cores - no more (tiny ISP's have more - out of necessity).
How much can it really scale up ?
Now instead of having a cluster that takes weeks to give you results, takes lots of man-hours to build and maintain, and spends only part of it's time being used...you can spin up (in minutes) a cluster that can do the work, then you can release the nodes and you're no longer paying.
Except a compute cluster that beats the crap out of the amazon cluster nodes (due to gpu performance) costs about $1500 per node. So every company with a need for these things can easily get a 10 or 20 node cluster going. You'd have much more bandwith to the local cluster than you'd have to the amazon cloud as a bon
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Except a compute cluster that beats the crap out of the amazon cluster nodes (due to gpu performance) costs about $1500 per node.
No. It most certainly does not. You're leaving out the high performance networking between the nodes, the server room, the image building machine, the salary of the sysadmin that set it up and maintains it, the cost of the building the server room is in, the cost of the electricity, etc.
And, again, the maximum cluster you'll spin up "in minutes" is 64 cores, no more. That's path
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"Especially when considering price, amazon really charges boatloads of cash for relatively trivial resources."
How they won't while there are not real competitors? Cloud computing by current standards (that's to say, those stablished by Amazon) has big entry costs but, if you really think Amazon is really so much overcharging, hey, that's your opportunity of becoming millonaire by downpricing them!
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Your argument was already weak, given that you can request more than the initial cap, and given that you disregarded all costs other than the cost of the blade units themselves
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Well, that's great and all, but if that is cloud computing, then why am I supposed to be interested ?
if you're not interested, then fine - you don't need it then.
I'm not interested in buying a purse, but that doesn't mean I want purses redefined until they're something I'm interested in. I'm not interested in buying lipstick, but that doesn't mean I want to redefine lipstick until it suits my needs, or scoff at anyone else who would want to use lipstick.
That you don't have a need for it, doesn't matter. Y
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I want a "server in the cloud", that works preferably just like a server on my desk, except with a faster internet connection and better cooling etc.
But it still needs to do things like letting me see it's screen, replug, reconfigure the network, add/remove disks, ...
The advantages of the cloud would be : -> ridiculous disk sizes possible (and for-rent - no capital cost) -> no capital investment -> someone else does hardware repair (and does it promptly) -> fast scaling, that means fast access to more & bigger memory, cpu, disk, ...
Congratulations, you just described Amazon AWS.
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that crap exists. It's not cloud. You're looking for Slicehost [slicehost.com]. They have a webconsole you can use to log in, disable networking, re-enable networking, the whole bit.
I don't get why people think that "cloud" merely means "hosted VM" when, in fact, it means nothing of the sort. If system 148 of a cluster of 250 stops responding, your cloud shouldn't notice or care; it should die automatically, and get replaced automatically. If you're beholden to the health of a particular system, then it's not Cloud Co
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Shut up (Score:5, Insightful)
Cloud Computing is such a loosely-defined and heavily abused term that its "true meaning" is almost as open to interpretation as "Web 2.0," and virtualised resources are often included in the definition.
The ever-colloquial Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] states that it "typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources" while Foldoc [reference.com] states that it is "A loosely defined term for any system providing access via the Internet to processing power, storage, software or other computing services."
I'm fine with people debating the issue of the term's definition and provenance, even with people saying that one meaning is correct and another isn't, but flatly denying the existence of controversy without bothering to cite your authority is not conducive to anyone's understanding. Please, explain your position rather than simply stating it.
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And hosting companies are starting to cash in on the new buzzword as well. I recently ran into it myself when figuring out an issue for a client. My write up: of the issue that I came across [silvatechsolutions.com].
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Personally, I'm just glad to see a reasonable and thoughtful *discussion* of what "Cloud Computing" is and how it could be (or might not be) useful; rather than the usual Slashdot knee jerk hatred for the entire concept. I'm sure that if I scroll down far enough I'll find a screed about how awful Cloud Computing is, and how no companies or governments would ever give up control of their data this way (despite the fact that many do); but for now I'm pretty happy to see people talking about the usefulness of
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The US government just awarded a large contract (or set of contracts) for IaaS:
Here [federalnewsradio.com]
They have 11 vendors - one of which is a company that is using AWS under the hood.
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Trying to define "cloud computing" is rather like trying to come up with a good definit
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Something like Gmail is clearly a "cloud" service. It offers email through either web, pop3, or IMAP interfaces with essentially complete abstraction of what goes on underneath.
Amazon, for its part, offers VMs, of various sizes, with essentially complete abstraction of what is underneath, accessible by means of one or more nearly frictionless programmatic ordering methods(as opposed to calling your account rep or filling out a PO
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"Something like Gmail is clearly a "cloud" service."
Yes. Of the SaaS kind.
"Amazon, for its part"
Is cloud computing too, of the IaaS kind.
How this gets so hard to understand?
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It's a desirable sort of ignorance though - the whole point is a layered design so above a certain level the implementer doesn't need to think about the hardware. Sure, behind the magic curtain will be a team of people create the "cloud" abstraction, to whom it's all very concrete and not cloudy at all. Call it "ignorance" if you like, but in computer science we use the euphemism "separation of
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"Virtual machines are not true cloud computing."
True.
But virtual machines plus on-demand self-servicing, plus elasticity on the number of deployed machines, plus per usage billing *is* cloud computing (of the IaaS kind, to be precise).
And that's exactly what they are asking for.
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VMs are a building block of a cloud computing environment. Definitions vary, but you can read Gartner's definition of Cloud [gartner.com], for example.
- Service interfaces
- Scalable and elastic
- Shared
- Metered by use
- Delivered over the Internet
So a VM is necessary but not sufficient; a VM is what you get when you virtualize an underlying resource pool. If you virtualize a pool of hardware, you get an elastic pool of shared compute resources; but there still needs to be more coordination to supply an API, metering, etc.
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http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/
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I was unclear. I was referring to Infrastructure as a Service Cloud. (Although newservers.com, for example, bills as "bare metal cloud", and comes very close to meeting the Gartner definition.)
And GAE and Gmail are definitely cloud services - a PaaS service and a SaaS service, respectively.
But there is a difference between a VM, and an IaaS Cloud service, even though ~all IaaS services will have a VM layer underpinning them.
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You could ask why not refer to Google App Engine as a Platform as a Service and leave it at that, or why not call gmail a software as a service, and leave it at that.
We're really only talking about semantics, so it's not like there's a right answer, per se. But I can say that I interact with people all the time in Fortune 500 companies, talking about cloud, and IaaS is firmly considered part of "cloud services" in the vernacular.
Amazon only provides IaaS but is clearly considered cloud. Even for large entir
Sometimes you need real hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
They missed the fact that RackSpace offers hybrid cloud options that Amazon just can't match at this point. Got IO issues? So did GitHub when they were running on Amazon's infrastructure. Know how they solved it? They moved to Rackspace and married the cloud for front-end with physical hardware for their IO intense workloads. It seems to me these guys may just be naive. They've probably only sidestepped their problems for now.
Re:Sometimes you need real hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
They missed the fact that RackSpace offers hybrid cloud options that Amazon just can't match at this point. Got IO issues? So did GitHub when they were running on Amazon's infrastructure. Know how they solved it? They moved to Rackspace and married the cloud for front-end with physical hardware for their IO intense workloads. It seems to me these guys may just be naive. They've probably only sidestepped their problems for now.
To be fair if they have probably solved their problems, in that Amazon cloud is extremely horizontally scalable. It is a typical "throw money at it" solution, like someone who has sent a package by motorcycle courtier solving the problem of shifting 10,000 packages between warehouses by hiring 10,000 motorcycle couriers - but it will probably work for them.
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Isn't "throw money at the problem" the whole point of "extensible" cloud computing?
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Isn't "throw money at the problem" the whole point of "extensible" cloud computing?
Yes. "Scalable" in cloud computing is usually interpreted to mean "scales linearly with amount of money applied". As long as the amount of benefit you're getting from it is also scaling at least linearly, that's an acceptable trade-off.
Can't solve for noisy neighbors with horizontal (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.
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Also funny, in the comments section with GoGrid.com trolling with a $100 coupon code. Way to sweeten the pot...
Re: Priceline for cloud! (Score:1)
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At least for a small instance, a reserved instance running full time for 3 years is 50% (50.8%, to be exact) of the cost of 3 years of full usage of an on demand instance. .085*24*365 = 744.6
(.03*24*365)+(350/3) = 378.666
Is the annual cost comparison.
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Like spotcloud [spotcloud.com]?
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Amazon is not running a cloud with their spare resources. I believe I heard at one point that someone (Zynga?) was running 10,000 VMs on amazon at once. And that's one customer. Amazon is trying to be THE host of the future. Which is funny, since their other business is retail.
But make no mistake - 10 years from now, Amazon could easily be known as the Cloud Infrastructure provider, who also happens to do some retail. (Or less than 10.)
Rackspace and Open Source (Score:1, Informative)
What's missing here is mention of Rackspace's recent effort with NASA on OpenStack. In short, Rackspace recently Open Sourced their Cloud Storage infrastructure, called Swift.
Colocation? (Score:3, Insightful)
My company has done the math and unless you only need the capacity say, 3 hours out of the day, EC2 (and Rackspace) simply can't compete with running your own hardware. We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Also, Rackspace and Amazon sell Xen virtualization hosting. The software is open source and freely available if you want to use it for yourself. I just guess "Cloud Hosting" sounds better but it's not that hard to roll a similar setup if you want the scalability.
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Or you need to scale from 100 to 100,000 users in two days.
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I don't know about you but I could rack and deploy 20 production servers in a day. One phone call to my ISP and we're in business.
Personally I'm more concerned with building a profitable company than infinite scalability. By rolling our own gear that puts us ahead a little bit more. I think that these cloud providers are neat, but only for a 1-off solution or a distributed computer problem -- not for running your whole business
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Also, if you consciously try to keep your code as efficient as possible and run it on something that isn't abstracted 10 frameworks deep, scalability suddenly becomes much less of a problem.
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Do you really think you can scale that easily ? Just by keeping the code efficient and avoiding frameworks ? Mmmm
Scaling is not just about your application. It's about the network, the bandwidth, the infrastructure (hardware and software - load balancing, caching, etc), getting rid of single point of failures, etc. This requires resources and knowldedge to handle. Once you start dealing with all that, the performance of your code is just one of your problems.
Re:Colocation? (Score:4, Informative)
Given that with Amazon, all their EC2 stuff is either uber-commodity linux VMs or available for local hosting via the Eucalyptus project(their storage mechanism, etc.) it is possible to adopt a hybrid "base load/burst load" strategy, similar to how the electrical utilities do it. If your operation has a more or less steady base load, you run it on cheap boxes of your own. If you have a load spike, you use the expensive; but quick to spin up, EC2 instances. Since modern virtualization overhead is low, and virtualization is extremely convenient anyway, you don't lose to much, you don't pay Amazon a flexibility fee for things you don't need to be flexible; but you can swiftly pay for additional capacity that works just like your local capacity, and then stop paying when you no longer need it.
If you need long-term, stable levels of service, you'd be insane to buy it from a burst-service company, just as very heavy cell users would be nuts to buy a contractless per-minute plan. Either do it in house or hire a hosting company to do it for you, on a stable basis.
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Except, of course, in order to do that you'll need to write your application in a certain way. You'd have to implement all sorts of things (like tunnels into amazon, but that's the very least of your worries). An application basically has to be written for the amazon cloud in order to function on top of it. Very different costs from having
So there are lots of extremely non-trivial costs associated with doing what you say. Lots of hoops to jump through, all of them cost money (even if your time is free, they
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An application basically has to be written for the amazon cloud in order to function on top of it.
That depends crucially on the details of the application. The main factor usually seems to be what the details of the IO are – you don't want to be shipping large datasets in and out of Amazon frequently if you can help it – together with how much extra stuff you feel like wrapping round the front end and what your method for recovering the costs is.
So there are lots of extremely non-trivial costs associated with doing what you say.
Indeed, but a lot of people seem to discount the costs of the alternatives too easily too. It's hard to come in under the price of Amazon for the so
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We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Except for the fact that hiring those engineers, buying those servers, and renting that space will be met with great resistance in most organizations. HR wont allow the extra headcount, legal is concerned about the safety of the space you're renting or some other BS, etc., etc. It's all a big headache and even if you decide to go through with it, it will take you weeks or even months to get off the ground.
But paying a monthly bill to Amazon? Nobody cares and you can have a new server running in minutes.
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The cloud is a revolution in billing. Not only do you sidestep all the HR/legal faff, you can bill the hosting cost to the department that uses the application instead of IT, it's impossible to price match competitors since you don't know how much it's going to cost until after you start the app. If someone writes crap code it auto spins up more instances and the hosting bill goes up, rather than someone having to write a document justifying additional expenditure.
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There are a lot of vendors providing appliances now that recognize this, and especially now that VMware has entered the cloud market with their cloud director product, you can expect to see an even bigger proliferation of appliances. Want to run LogLogic? Don't buy a box, push a "deploy appliance" button at your provider. What, your new group needs a sharepoint server? Push buttan.
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(1) You just assumed that your use case was all use cases. Here's an example of a company I've done work for that is in the cloud. They have software that maps 2d face photos onto 3d models and then can render video out in flash that is customized for the user. (If you tried Nike's world cup you-in-the-advertisement video ad, that was them.) Can you imagine how variable demand is if your cpu utilization goes up 10,000% when a client pushes an ad to market, versus when you're largely idle and doing demos and
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I know of one large bank that got rid of 30,000 desktop machines in favor of 10,000 racked servers and KMS services.
Please say you meant 1,000 servers. Like check with the bank if you're not 100% sure.
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Amazon is really expensive. Did you do the math with less expensive services like gandi.net, vps.net, xlshosting.com, jiffybox.de?
Locked Out (Score:2)
I locked myself out of a server the other day hosted on rackspace. I was able to console it from the management interface and fix the issue, not sure if I could have recovered that on ec2.
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Just spawn a new one, attach your data to it, then kill your old. Sure it takes ~15 minutes, but you act like it's impossible.
Proofreading is a concept... (Score:2)
If you are going to post a "missive to the world" slamming someone's product, you ought to at least proofread it. It's just a bit embarrassing that the very first sentence doesn't make any sense. “...our hardware is” - yes, it's very existential hardware.
Serving as your local grammar nazi today...
Come on George (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, 'The Cloud Wars' isn't the title of the next Star Wars movie? Oh, sorry.
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Damn you sir! Good writing and acting has no place in Star Wars!
Cloud Wars (Score:3, Funny)
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Linux admins, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire. During the battle, GNU spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, ISS, a system that brings any self-respecting admin to tears. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Tove Torvalds races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the network.
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It is a period of civil war. Rebel Linux admins, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire. During the battle, GNU spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, ISS, a system that brings any self-respecting admin to tears. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Tove Torvalds races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the network.
Do you mean IIS? Or are you talking about that moon orbiting overhead?
That's no moon... (Score:2)
Do you mean IIS? Or are you talking about that moon orbiting overhead?
That's no moon... It's a Space Station!
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Amazon has that last 1% (Score:2)
The difference between a great idea and a billion dollars is that last 1% of the implementation - the distance between "cool" and "perfect".
I think Amazon may have bridged that gap.
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Amazon's offering is great, but it has a long way to go to perfect. If you use a VMware cloud director based cloud service, you start to get a feel for how much more can be done. For example, as soon as you can just click on a VM and have a full keyboard-mouse-screen console pop up, you start to wonder why you'd want to live without it.
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Maybe they'll get the next billion dollars.
Huh? (Score:2)
You gotta be kidding me ... this story has been up for over an hour, and nobody has said ... "begun, the cloud war has".
I assumed that was the whole purpose of the title? :-P Or is everyone else disavowing knowledge of Episodes 2&3. ;-)
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Bah, you can't disavow episode 1 -- how else can you vent spleen at Jar Jar Binks?
Like it or not, it happened. :-P
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Episodes 2&3 of what?
And why are you making a Yoda-like quote?
No SSL at Google (Score:2)
Biggest issue is I have with Google cloud is it's not secure using your own domain name. You have to use google's SSL address and that doesn't fly for a lot of people.
Cloud computing takes away freedom (Score:2)
You know this is another complaint people had with the old mainframe software. All "power" is in the hands of the cloud provider, and you get what they choose to give, and not a bit more. The power of lots of corporations tends to get concentrated into a single huge entity like this. The mainframe "providers" maintained such an extreme lock-in that most banks are still locked in to the system, TODAY.
Why in the name of all that is good and holy do we want to return to that ? This is why GNU brought us out of
Rackspace Cloud is the worst service I've had... (Score:1, Informative)
Rackspace is generally known for great service, so I didn't hesitate to sign up and start using their cloud service for a business idea. Unfortunately, Rackspace Cloud was essentially another company that Rackspace bought and did not fully integrate or bring up to their own standards.
The several months that I had them before I migrated, I experienced:
1) Horrible technical support and the inability to get any of the actual administrators on the phone to troubleshoot. Terrible escalation procedures. If my sys
Rackspace Cloud is simple (Score:2)
I use Rackspace Cloud because it's simple. There's nothing to mount, nor is there a huge learning curve with setting up a VM. It's a great way to experiment with servers on a shoestring budget.
However, things change when you're moving from a handful of manually-configured VMs to an army designed to handle lots of load. Amazon's learning curve is certainly worth considering once you need to tune towards an app's specific scalability needs.
No mention of Rack Space Cloud Sites (Score:3, Interesting)
Rack Space cloud sites is true cloud hosting, You do not add servers, you just pay for CPU usage like you are buying bandwidth. It is expensive and you can not customize it, but it always works and scales to meet demand.
It is not a VM, where you can install your own OS, Web server, etc. It is a apache server, mysql clustered backend and varnish cache front end.
Great for Blog hosting, PHP applications, etc. We do about 8-10 million page views on it per month and like it for what it is,
If I had staff that needed to configure servers all day, it would be different, but for hosting large dynamic LAMP websites, it is great and reliable.
Andrew
Right tool for the job (Score:2)
I'm a happy Rackspace Cloud customer. I use it for a few small VMs that I treat like normal, uniquely-configured servers, but I don't have to mess with all the details of running a data center, and that makes my life easier. I looked at EC2, and it became very obvious that it was not intended to be used that way. If you want to do the whole dynamic cloud thing where your log scraper uses an API to request more CPU for this VM, more RAM for that VM, and duplicate a few more web front-end hosts, EC2 defini
Cons of amazon? (Score:1)
Anyone know what the cons of amazon cloud is at this point???
Sometimes applications don't scale ... (Score:2)
I don't want to step on any toes, but mixpanel does not seem to have the kind of traffic or growth [alexa.com] that would call for dramatic measures (or articles). It looks like their application must be very I/O-intensive and most, if not all commercial clouds would be bad/limiting for them (does any provider give you numbers comparable to your own 10gbe or IB infrastructure without virtualization?). Sure, they can provide some room for growth on demand, but if it doesn't fit your application because you need I/O both
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Did your cost estimate/comparison include the salaries of all the people that have to maintain and administer the hardware you bought yourself?
Cloud needs a standard compute metric (Score:1)