Cloud Hosting
To all new comers to clouds, the very first question to pop up is which Cloud Hosting to pick. The Cloud Hosting is one of the hot business nowadays and it is getting more crowded with many companies offering different services. Often, it is very confusing with the cloud stack: clients, services, applications, platforms, storage and infrastructure. Well, that is a lot of things to discuss. Today, we only talk about the Cloud Hosting in platform, storage, and infrastructure.
There are some company names that stands out from the rest in Cloud Hosting’s selection but it doesn’t mean the others are not good. They are Amazon, Google, Rackspace and GoGrid.
Out of these four, Amazon, Rackspace, and GoGrid are comparable since they all offer cloud services at storage and infrastructure level. Each storage unit is usually measured in Gigabytes and each Gigabyte storage costs around 10-15 cents/month. Of course, you can store as much as needed and pay accordingly. For the infrastructure, the cost of around 10 cents/hour is based on a unit of computation in terms of memory and CPU power. For example, if you purchase 1 unit of infrastructure in Amazon equals to purchasing a machine of 1.7G Rams and a CPU power of 1.2 GHz CPU (2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor). Obviously, you can buy as many infrastructure unit as necessary. Once you have this unit, you can put any OS, application,. etc on it, or you can build a cluster of many of these units. If your business requires more computing power, either Rams or CPU power, you can buy advanced units with the power equivalent to 2 or more of these small units at a time and definitely, you can build another cluster out of these high end units.
GoGrid also offers a hybrid solution, which means you can add your own hardware or load balancer in the mix of its cloud servers. This is necessary in case you want some control over your cloud deployments instead of handing off to the automation deployment services. For instance, things such as PCI compliant or privacy need some control here.
Amazon only offers the cloud automation deployment service which means if you ask for a computation unit, you will have it instantly but you don’t know exactly where it locates and how close it is to your existing units. However, Amazon provides others out-of-the shelf infrastructure products such as Simple DB and Simple Queue services. These are scalable database and queue products in Amazon cloud infrastructure.
Rackspace is similar to Amazon’s offering excluding Simple DB and Simple Queue. Rackspace is growing fast with a lot of customers at the time of writing this article and its fee is cheaper than Amazon’s.
Google’s cloud on the other hand is platform level cloud services. You write an application in Java or Python and deploy it into Google’s cloud platform leveraging its BigTable and Google’s Account service. A good thing about using Google’s cloud is that it lets your application to grow traffic to a level until it starts charging you. A bad thing is that if your application can run in Google’s cloud, it can’t run in other environments.
Overall, each of these clouds are great as well as the others non-mentioned cloud hosting services. To get the best out of a cloud, you better pick one that suits your applications and businesses as well as the costs. After all, have a confidence in cloud services.
What is Cloud?
What is the cloud? I was asked this very question by one of my friends… I hesitated to answer the question. How do I start? What information should I convey? I wanted my answer to provide a solid deterministic feel. I have been working on this cloud for so long.
Unfortunately, cloud means a lot of different things for different people. For Silicon Valley startups, it is all about building/ utilizing the cloud for their customers. For end users, it provides a level of convenience unsurpassed by anything else in Technology Offerings.
Lets focus on end users for a little while. Since the PC dawn (around 1980′s), the PC has been the hub of information technology for professionals, casual users, gamers, children etc. Software allowed the same piece of hardware perform multiple functions at the same time. The same machine could process accounts, do contact management, play games, look up encyclopaedia etc. Then came the internet.
Internet is a network of computers connected together. These connections allow us to refer to information residing in other computers. Lot of good information became available to people to consume, produce. Business started to take advantage of this phenomenon, and E-Commerce started to thrive: there were websites which allowed people to shop right from their computers. Banks, and other financial institutions started offering services so that their customers could start managing their accounts online. Travel sites allow for building trips online.
The promise of cloud takes this evolution further. Specialized services commoditize sophisticated software and hardware requirements away. This is happening in many different areas at once! Broadly classified, the problems being solved are:
- requiring specialized software
- Authoring tools such as Word, Visio, Power Point,…:
- Enterprise Software such as CRM, ERP, Project Management, FTP, ….
- Communication Tools such as EMail, SMS
- requiring specialized hardware
- Storage: Backup, Archive
- Computation: Virus Scanning, Spam Filtering, Search Engine, …
The convenience to users is tremendous. Specialized tasks needed for maintaining complex software/ hardware systems now goes back to specialized companies (Software as a Service vendors). No more software update nightmares, disk crashes, backups, hardware maintenance issues. Users are able to access specialized software from the comfort of their favorite web browser.
As a summary, cloud is a natural evolution of the internet technology. It brings with it the convenience, cost savings, and accessibility of specialized software to the masses of people. My friend was satisfied with my answer. Her next question: how do you go about building the cloud? will be the topic of a forthcoming post – stay tuned!!!
