A Weblog…Again

Amazon Cloud Hosting

I have been meaning to play around with creating a virtual machine instance on Amazon Web Services  for quite a while now, but I saw this guide from Dave Winer and decided to give it a whirl.  It took me about 30 minutes from start to finish to get a brand new Windows based image created and started on Amazon’s cloud using EC2 and S3.  This is just simply amazing and drop-dead simple.  Why anyone would want to host their web application on their own hardware is beyond me.  Amazon has made creating a virtual machine image almost as easy as ordering a book.  Because I had my virtual machine instance only turned on for a few minutes, this little exercise cost nothing.  I would strongly urge every technical person to try this out, just for the mere sake of seeing how simple. powerful and disruptive this technology is.  Using Amazon’s cloud services is still too expensive (about $90/month) for hosting a personal weblog or something like that, but it is an ideal candidate for a startup that needs hosting services with minimal operational management overhead. 

Application Requests in the Cloud and Load Balancing

MacVittie does make a very good point in this article, "Not all application requests are created equal".  She argues that by abstracting away the benefits of Layer 7 load balancing when moving applications into the cloud, we lose the ability to tweak how our applications perform.  One of the supposed benefits of the cloud is that it takes away all the tweaking and configuration of the network level and load-balancers falling erroneously into that category.  Load-balancers though have evolved into application delivery platforms so it seems like their functionality should be exposed on the cloud.  The cloud’s answer to this is that horizontal scalability will address any and all performance issues.  This may or may not be true and will likely depend on the individual implementation of the particular cloud.  I think that clouds are still in their infancy and that the current generation of clouds, i.e., "Cloud 1.0", will have a limited set of features that are exposed to its customers  As it matures, I am quite confident that customer demand for greater control will force clouds to expose functionality like this so that they can have greater granular control of their "mini-cloud".

Developers Replacing Network Admins with Cloud Computing

Very interesting article, Why virtualization is shaking up IT data center, that begins to hint at how data centers will change as virtualization and more importantly unified computing gain predominance.  In particular, I was struck by one passage:

Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.

By moving data and applications to the cloud, an organization will not need to maintain network admin skillsets, rather what will be more in demand will be the ability to interact with and extract data from the cloud using programmatic interfaces.  Increasingly, the choice of the interface is REST based as is witnessed by Amazon Web Services.  So the question arises, if an organization is 100% cloud-based for all of its IT services, is their a role for a network admin?  Increasingly, the answer appears to be "no".

What It Takes to be a “Cloud Platform”

The cloud platform players are shaking out.  Obvioulsy, Google, Salesforce, Amazon are leading the pack and newer entrants like Microsoft are trying to stake their own claim.  This is a good article that describes some of the characteristics of a successfull cloud platform:

•  Easy to use, ’standards’ oriented development code
•  Reliable and secure development environment
• Automated and flexible procurement capabilities
• Name recognition and brand equity
• Customer base and channels to market
• Developer/Partner network

Virtualization & “Elastic Infrastructure”

In this post, Lori MacVittie seems to be stretching it in this post of her defense of F5 appliances as "elastic infrastructure".  Certainly, it is true that the virtualization hype is off the charts right now and there is a rush to virtualize all aspects of the network infrastructure and that this is an unwise move (see here).  But to state that "VIPRION essentially treats each blade like a virtual image" is simply untrue.  What about the hassle of procuring another blade, obtaining CapEx signoff, shipment, delivery, etc.  With a "virtual" appliance none of those concerns are there.  I’m not saying that she is wrong about advising the use of hardware for stability, reliability, security, it is just that she is trying to put a square in a circle by stating that a hardware appliance is like a virtual appliance. 

Cloud Computing in Plain English Video

An exceptionally well done video that effectively and concisely explains "cloud computing", its origins, the value proposition, etc.  Highly recommend to watch it a couple of times!!

Link

Update:

Another good video about cloud computing.

Link