The best article I've ever read about cloud computing

Cuts through the hype and explains what it's really about.

And most importantly if you suddenly realize that you need 50 new machines, then you simply didn’t do your job well.

The cloud is great. Stop the hype.

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.

Converting a real machine into a virtual one

I've just followed some very helpful instructions on taking an image of a real (Linux) machine and turning it into Virtual Machine.

It boots, but at the moment I can't get the display (i.e. X-windows) to work.

Jumpbox - simple virtual servers

I've been investigating jumpbox, who give you downloadable virtual servers that do one thing well - e.g. wiki, bug tracking, Wordpress, Joomla. It seems a great idea. Normally I don't blog about things unless I'm using them in earnest, but I thought I'd share some details here in case you can't find out how the pricing works.

I couldn't find much on the site about what you get for free and what you pay for, until I'd downloaded a virtual machine and ran it. When I got to the register page there was an iframe pointing to this product overview which gives you the overview of what you get for free and what you get for registering (which costs).

Basically if you pay you get backup, customisation and support.

When It Just Works for you, but not for someone else

Follow up on my previous post where I said my virtual machine Just Worked.

The trouble with resuming a virtual machine is that it's got its IP address from the last time. For the person who's since got that IP address, It Doesn't Just Work, It Stops Working.

Lesson learned.

Pleased with virtual machines

I've got an Ubuntu virtual machine which I've used quite a lot recently. For one thing I can ssh onto other Linux machines (both real and virtual themselves), where my windows ssh client struggles with certificates.

I've got it mapping a windows drive via samba, and when I start it up when I need to use it it magically does the stuff behind the scenes so that I can access the files on the windows share without having to remap or anything. It's a bit slow for the first access, but considering the virtual machine has been suspended not shutdown, I'm still amazed at how It Just Works.

Virtual hosting

I've been recommended slicehost.com for virtual hosting. Prices start at $20/month, so you for twice or three times what you may pay for shared hosting you get a virtual server to yourself. I haven't used them myself, so I can't personally vouch for them, but it looks good.

One warning though, you may have to wait up to about 5 weeks if you pay 3 months in advance - pay 12 months in advance and it should be less than a week.

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