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. 

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".

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.