Cloud Provider ‘Economies of Scale’ Overblown?
Posted on Nov 23, 2008 by Randy Bias
The notion that an Amazon or Google has an inherent cost advantage in building infrastructure is plain wrong. This notion comes up over and over again in cloud computing discussions. Most recently on a thread where I responded in some detail. Recommend you start there and then as soon as...
Massive MySQL & ZFS Scale-Up Capability
Posted on Nov 20, 2008 by Randy Bias
This article shows how easy it is to throw hardware at a problem and ‘scale up’ and part of why I think it’s clear that using virtual machines in a cloud alone isn’t sufficient. Some times you can solve problems by throwing hardware at it. Yes… That’s 79,000 SQL queries...
Cloud: Evolution or Revolution?
Posted on Nov 20, 2008 by Randy Bias
Every once in a while you see this crop up in discussions about the cloud. It’s easy to see why. It feels like there is something ground breaking going on, but clearly the technology that came before set the stage. Grid computing, utility computing, SaaS, network 1.0, and ubiquitous virtualization...
3-way Replication in the Cloud
Posted on Nov 19, 2008 by Randy Bias
It’s been busy here. I’ll announce why soon, but one thing that caught my eye recently that just can’t go by is the imminent open sourcing of DRBD+. DRBD+ is the commercial version of DRBD. This has serious implications for anyone who is serious about building real world cloud applications....
Amazon Competes Against RightScale
Posted on Oct 23, 2008 by Randy Bias
There was a flurry of EC2 announcements from Amazon today including: Windows availability Removing EC2 BETA status & providing a real SLA Perhaps most interesting is this pre-announcement of 2009 functionality, which will squarely put them in direct competition with many of the startups depending on them, such as RightScale...
Can You Trust Cloud Computing?
Posted on Oct 17, 2008 by Randy Bias
A thoughtful blog posting from Khoi Vinh asks whether we can trust clouds given the current financial climate. It’s good to be cautious about trusting all of your data to ‘the cloud’, but you should already be evaluating your cloud providers based on their ability to give you a backup...
Clouds are not Datacenters
Posted on Oct 9, 2008 by Randy Bias
There is ongoing confusion about the relationship between clouds and datacenters. You can see this with the term ‘virtual datacenter’ in reference to servers in the cloud or the lengths to which some folks go to bring datacenter-centric methodologies to the cloud[1]. Unfortunately, clouds are not datacenters. They ride on...
Cloud Conference Recap
Posted on Jul 3, 2008 by Randy Bias
As I mentioned, last week had a very robust spate of cloud computing and infrastructure related conferences. All three of the conferences were new and I thought I would quickly recap and review them for folks who wanted to consider attending them next year. The three events can be summarized...
Cloud Hype, Cloud Boom, Cloud Bust
Posted on Jun 30, 2008 by Randy Bias
While there is still a lot of discussion about defining ‘cloud computing’ there seems to be a general consensus that it’s a burgeoning market, which will, at some unknown point in the future, hit the requisite ‘bust’. This was my sense this past week after attending not just one, but...
Yahoo! Reaches for the Sky
Posted on Jun 27, 2008 by Randy Bias
Finally.
More competition is good.