Clouds everywhere

Clouds are the new big thing, and like most rising technology concepts that you can give a single word or acronym to, its not something you can some up in a single sentence. This post is really to help me get my head around latest developments as you'll find better expert commentary elsewhere.

VMware have vCloud which sounds like you can take a virtual image and chuck it up into their cloud.

When I came across this the other day I noticed that Rackspace were on their list of Hosting Services. However when I went to the Rackspace website I found no mention of it.

Then last week the Rackspace Cloud Event happened. This seems to be plugging their existing Mosso cloud service, and their purchase of Jungledisk and Slicehost. I am familiar with Slicehost when I was investigating virtual server providers. They seem to have a good reputation and it looks like this is a good purchase for both parties.

Jungledisk runs on Amazon's S3 currently, and Amazon can now offer Windows machines under EC2, so Microsoft are getting into this.

And now we have Azure which I find it hard to understand, but includes lots of cloud stuff for Microsoft technologies like .NET and SQLServer. It encompasses the previous Mesh stuff, so it looks like a pretty big pile of technologies. "Stack" sounds too organised. It would be nice to try it out, but the SDK is Vista/Server 2008 only. It's ironic that although they support lots of open stuff like SOAP and REST they insist on the latest version of their own platform.

EC2 pricing

The penny has just dropped with EC2 pricing. You don't pay by the CPU/hour, you pay by the instance/hour. So even if your instance is doing nothing you pay $0.10 per hour. That's $72 per month, which is much more than basic hosting plans. So it's worth it, if you want that much control over your virtual machine.

EC2

My latest bit of playing around, er, investigation, is with Amazon's EC2 service. I'm thinking of using it for website hosting. I don't expect the website will get much use, but I'm hoping that I can just run up new instances if I need them, and use the simple DNS round robin load balancing to share the load.

From my research there are better ways to load balance, but this should be enough at the moment. Now I just have to pick a suitable distribution and try out my Catalyst application on it.

tags: ec2