EC2 Vs. App Engine Vs. GoGrid Vs. AppNexus 109
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."
Missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAICT, they aren't intended to. The deepest problems are software problems for which there is no general solution, only problem-specific solutions for each particular task; what they are intended to deal with is the hardware problem that having a scalable software solution is of limited value if you have a fixed pool of hardware and have to go through disruptive upgrades when you expand that pool of hardware (and deal with the associated capital costs.)
Cloud computing services are, largely, tools to help dynamically "right-size" hardware, changing it from a capital investment that requires predicting the future well to plan right to an operating costs that can be quickly adjusted based on changing needs. Complaining that they don't solve the fundamental problems of software scalability seems to be missing the point.
Re:Missing the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, this whole article, I think, misses the point. The cloud, by its very nature, forces you to develop a solution that is intrinsically scalable. It doesn't develop it for you. Who the heck imagines that it is the responsibility of a hosting provider to make your platform scalable? Give me a break!
EC2 is not your typical co-hosting service, nor should you ever treat it like one. To properly implement a platform upon it, you, the programmer / admin need to implement machine images which have the ability to come up, plug in, and start handling requests - all without further intervention. It's a lot of work to get to that point.
No cloud service should be judged by how much engineering this requires, because it's not their responsibility. You can run crap on the cloud, and that's not the cloud's fault. But - you do the hard work first, and the cloud opens up a whole new world. Imagine - the ability to automatically scale your capacity up or down, based upon load. Pay only for what you use, and not a penny more - something that traditional colocation/hosting cannot possibly give you.
I don't know about you, but if I were running a .com start-up, with the potential for huge growth, I would really the thought that I am ready for almost any amount of traffic, no matter what.
Re:The definition of cloud computing is still vagu (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best way i've heard it explained is:
"When details of implementation are sufficiently hidden away that you no longer have to think about them, people often draw a 'cloud' around it, just like you do with the internet where (most of us) don't have to worry about all the wires and the protocols but it's just there, and it just works.."
Cloud computing is trying to draw the same cloud around.. computing (resources), you don't have to worry about connectivity, electricity, how to make db's and file systems scale across systems.. it's an abstract cloud that's just there without having to worry about it.