Page 4 of 4 FirstFirst 1234
Results 76 to 96 of 96

Thread: True clouds

  1. #76
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Posts
    162
    I'm not talking about more utilization, just more variation in utilization. I would agree that's not so big a difference between hourly and daily utilization. A lot of clouds offer only monthly pricing though.

    As far as EC2's pricing, the reserve instance pricing is pretty competitive. Comparing monthly prices to demand prices is apples and oranges.

  2. #77
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    MILLAU
    Posts
    306
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    I would agree with Andrew above.

    Also, Amazon can drop prices because they are already one of the most expensive clouds in the business!
    I also agree with Andrew on this one, don't forget that Amazon or Google or whatever big boys will never be able to offer the average Small Medium sized business clients the personalized individual Service they will expect... this is where Andrew is correct there will be a stable higher price market for that client base who need and wish this Service from their provider... personalized Service will be King hey we should market it as ServiceaaS

  3. #78
    Quote Originally Posted by jroc View Post
    I'm not talking about more utilization, just more variation in utilization. I would agree that's not so big a difference between hourly and daily utilization. A lot of clouds offer only monthly pricing though.
    fair enough - certainly "any" utility rate vs monthly rate would impact capacity requirements. variation in utilization isnt a big deal as a provider will not care who is using what and when - its more of a macro image on average usage, average peak usage and available capacity.

  4. #79
    personalized Service will be King hey we should market it as ServiceaaS
    made me smile

    Quote Originally Posted by Henrik Holben View Post
    I also agree with Andrew on this one, don't forget that Amazon or Google or whatever big boys will never be able to offer the average Small Medium sized business clients the personalized individual Service they will expect... this is where Andrew is correct there will be a stable higher price market for that client base who need and wish this Service from their provider...
    its not just "personal service" - its also SLA, guaranteed capacity, actual uptime over x period, etc.. some of the giants simply cant compete and are continually proving it..

  5. #80
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    MILLAU
    Posts
    306
    Quote Originally Posted by cartika-andrew View Post

    its not just "personal service" - its also SLA, guaranteed capacity, actual uptime over x period, etc.. some of the giants simply cant compete and are continually proving it..
    I absolutely agree with you that's big pluses there's where we have our advantage I don't care how many $$$ millions Amazon has spent building their Cloud they can never ever offer the client the personal touch and service the holding hands that clients do need and want... I wouldn't worry about Amazon lowering their prices so much that market is not profitable for most providers to enter that segment ... higher scale ServiceasS is the way to go to have good margins...

  6. #81
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    Dub,Lon,Dal,Chi,NY,LA
    Posts
    1,839
    We've certainly swung well away from 'true clouds'

  7. #82
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    MILLAU
    Posts
    306
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    We've certainly swung well away from 'true clouds'
    Huh? What is a "true cloud" again?! back to basics enlighten me... okay we know it walks... it talks... usually ends with a big fat shiny "S"

  8. #83
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    Dub,Lon,Dal,Chi,NY,LA
    Posts
    1,839
    The discussion was (started by masterbo)

    "In short, what feature should have true cloud hosting?"

    Discussion the prices of cloud falls outside the question.

    Perhaps outline what features a 'true' cloud has, that you have not yet seen in the market?

  9. #84
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Posts
    162
    The actual price isn't an important attribute but the pricing model is. If the pricing isn't elastic, it doesn't really matter if the cloud itself is.

  10. #85
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Novosibirsk, Russia
    Posts
    1,710
    Quote Originally Posted by jroc View Post
    ... This signals to me that Amazon is at a maturity level where most of the very risky variance now washes out in their enormous volume. Its not going to get easier for other companies to reach this same level of volume; the landscape is littered with completely unknown providers all offering the same services, at the same prices as each other.
    I am using Amazon' services for many years. Mostly, it's S3, as extremely durable and easy-to-connect storage. CloudFront, since the moment it introduced pull-type CDN capabilities.

    I tried Route 53 (DNS hosting; pricing is very strange - fixed component contradicts their motto "pay only for what you use") and will most probably cancel the experiment. I tried RDS: it turned out I'd better set up MariaDB on the same-type EC2 instance, and it would work faster. There are useful and useless services at AWS, and that's normal, that's a personal opinion and tastes differ.

    There are many services at AWS that are priced quite reasonably and could be very useful for almost any type of application hosted elsewhere, provided connectivity is good.

    But speaking of elasticity and scalability, it's simply missing in EC2. Other services, not based upon EC2 scale OK. EC2 is still in its primitive from.

    Also, it should be noted that AWS in its pure form is for geeks (in positive meaning). It's not for an average, inexperienced user. AWS is powerful with its API, its their most solid and superior aspect that other providers only start to get equal with.

    And, since AWS is self-managed service, basically (if you tried to get real technical assistance through forums, you understand what I mean), it will become unreachable for an average user - they simply won't buy management/support at the price offered.

    AWS is a great, stable, feature-rich services assortment for projects of enterprise scale. It has nothing to do with personal, inexpensive, user-friendly service ("it selects its friends itself"). Trying to get personal friendly attention is like asking a Borg to help with your mouse not clicking properly. "This is irrelevant. Do it yourself".

    So, Amazon is a good example of how well-controlled feature-rich efficient services can be implemented. And I respect them much for that - and for the stability. However, as a user, I always feel the mentioned atmosphere ("You are not perfect. Your desires are irrelevant. You will be assimilated").

    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    The discussion was (started by masterbo)

    "In short, what feature should have true cloud hosting?"

    Discussion the prices of cloud falls outside the question.

    Perhaps outline what features a 'true' cloud has, that you have not yet seen in the market?
    We talked about technical part.
    Nothing prevents us from starting an additional topic (in another thread, for example), or just continue it here - to discuss user interface, pricing model, support. At least one of those (user interface) was mentioned in the original discussion.

    Thanks.
    Last edited by Master Bo; 05-18-2012 at 09:06 PM. Reason: typos, merging responses

  11. #86
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    Dub,Lon,Dal,Chi,NY,LA
    Posts
    1,839
    So, with 6 pages of thread - are we any close to defining what the market thinks a 'true' cloud is?

  12. #87
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Novosibirsk, Russia
    Posts
    1,710
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    So, with 6 pages of thread - are we any close to defining what the market thinks a 'true' cloud is?
    I can't speak for all the market, but from a user's viewpoint it is:

    • High availability
    • Automated failover
    • Guaranteed resources (those my VMs/apps are assigned I only share with others if I will to)
    • On-the-fly flexible scaling (all the primary resources - CPU, RAM, storage)
    • Well-documented API and GUI capable of doing the same tasks
    • Fine grain billing (at least on hourly basis)


    Note that cloud in what I mean by it is not just for running VMs, but for application hosting as well.

  13. #88
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    Dub,Lon,Dal,Chi,NY,LA
    Posts
    1,839
    Nice list!

    I think there are several clouds that meet all of those descriptions - although hourly billing is more a business model decision than a definition of cloud I think?

  14. #89
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Novosibirsk, Russia
    Posts
    1,710
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    Nice list!

    I think there are several clouds that meet all of those descriptions - although hourly billing is more a business model decision than a definition of cloud I think?
    Business model, yes.

    However, in my case daily or finer billing is a must: I usually have to construct a VM either to demonstrate something, or test, or whatever else.

    And I have no intention to buy a monthly subscription, if I may use quite few hours one month, and all the resources the next one. I need pay-as-I-go approach, even if it's more expensive compared to subscriptions.

    So far, from among known clouds, CloudSigma has the best billing approach. Both monthly subscriptions and pay-as-you-go are available. I can use both short- and long-living VMs using optimal pricing in such a case.

  15. #90
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Location
    Portugal
    Posts
    11
    Daily billing is a big plus, as some told its great to launch a few vms for test purposes or even for benchmarking before buy an entire month. Even with a higher cost its something that most cloud companies should provide.

  16. #91
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    Austin Tx
    Posts
    2,007
    It's so hard to define exactly what cloud is now-a-days. I would say it's HA with auto-failover and self-healing in part...but by the definition an installation of Proxmox with a master and more then one slave has HA at that level...so is Proxmox on multiple nodes "cloud" also?

    In the beginning, cloud was touted to be true machine agnostic computing, with multiple nodes sharing, or comprising in part to create a whole "virtual" environment where CPU cycles, memory, and physical space where truly ran in a shared environment. I've yet to see that come about as described in the "early days", when it was put fourth as more like the old "Seti at home" idea where multiple computers gave part of their processor to help the whole cause. Expand that idea to memory space and storage, and this is what cloud should be. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of virtual sever nodes with HA ability.

    I can make "cloud" with two OpenVZ nodes by todays most accepted definition.

  17. #92
    Responsive 24/7 Support
    True Cloud Platform
    Supported Applications
    Buy Only What You Need

  18. #93
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    So, with 6 pages of thread - are we any close to defining what the market thinks a 'true' cloud is?
    Nope-Never! BUT!!!
    If this thread does hit page 6, at least it would have prevented 6 (maybe more) possible new threads from started asking the very same question which started this one.

  19. #94
    A lot of confusion about VPS/Virtualization and Cloud...

    My mantra for what a true cloud is/would be is the text from from Barry Lynn, one of the makers of Applogic.

    Apologies for long text, which was written at start of 2010

    ==
    I don’t know why, but I am still surprised when I hear the following question. What’s the difference between virtualization and Cloud? To me, it’s like asking the question – What’s the difference between a hammer and carpentry? The latter is a comprehensive craft. The former is one of many tools used by the craftsmen who practice it.

    Simple – right? So why does that question occur at all?

    It occurs, in my opinion, for two reasons, one right and one not so right.

    The first reason is that all of the server virtualization vendors of any significance are also introducing Cloud offerings to the market. So, people are naturally associating the two (and rightfully so, just like one would associate hammers and carpentry). The difference is, though, no one thinks hammers and carpentry are the same thing.

    So, the not so right reason – There are Cloud computing laggards out there who would like us to think that virtualization and Cloud are similar because they have embraced virtualization technology and do not want to appear out of step. As a result, there is a ton of noise in the market that is very hard to sort through.

    So, how do I suggest one sorts through this noise?

    When faced with a potential Cloud solution, ask a few questions about it.

    Does it help me provision and deploy virtual machines on demand? If the answer is no, I’d ask why are you even looking at it? But if the answer is yes, just deploying VMs on demand does not a Cloud make.

    Does it enable the encapsulation and on demand deployment of multiple VMs as a single entity? If rather than managing VMs, you want to manage frequently used “appliances” that are comprised of multiple VMs (e.g. a specific app server, a specific messaging system and a specific database server), can you do it? If the answer is yes, you are on your way to a real Cloud solution.

    Does it enable the encapsulation and on demand deployment of whole software stacks (e.g. LAMP, Ruby on Rails, .NET, etc.)? If the answer is yes, you are certainly in the Cloud.

    But, do you want more? Does it enable encapsulation and on demand deployment of entire multi-tiered apps? If yes, you have a very powerful Cloud solution.

    More? Does it enable the encapsulation of the apps along with everything they need to run – network, storage, infrastructure, configurations, policies, documentation, etc., etc., etc.? If yes, then you have the most complete Cloud solution of all.

    So, you might sense a theme here – Encapsulation. Yes. Encapsulation is key, but it is only half of the story. Encapsulation itself results in many benefits, especially operational cost savings and decreased time to market. But encapsulation alone does not make a Cloud. It does not create portability. It does not create the ability, by itself, to deploy anywhere, any time.

    What’s the second half of the story? Abstraction. Not only do the most comprehensive Cloud solutions have to provide unlimited granularity of encapsulation, but they must completely abstract what is encapsulated from the physical resources (machines) they run on, so that they can run anytime, anywhere there are available idle resources.

    In short, you do not measure a Cloud solution by how it does virtualization. You measure it by the granularity of its encapsulation capabilities and its ability to abstract VMs, stacks, apps/services and entire data centers from the physical resources they run on.

    So, what is the future of virtualization and where is it going in 2010?

    Virtualization is going the way of the hammer. It will be a necessary commodity for the Cloud, just like the hammer is a necessary commodity for the carpenter.

    Now, before all the virtualization vendors get their shorts in a knot and start screaming at me that I am implying that all virtualization is the same, I am not. I acknowledge that some have features others do not, some outperform others, etc. But, can you tell who the best carpenter is only by knowing what brand of hammer he uses?
    ===

    Hope this shed some light on what Cloud is/should be.

  20. #95
    For now there are no real web clouds. To have one you need complete stack + properly written code.

    1. Cloud service consisting of distributed, separated nodes
    2. Tools that allow distributed processing and scaling
    3. Code written with scalability and failover in mind.

    Where are we today?

    1. Nodes are centralized, they use shared I/O... they support scaling to some (very little) extent and failover (support for that is even worse).

    I had real computation cloud in university. 200 computers, MPI interface. When one node died it just finished computation on some other one... when storage in this "cloud hosting" dies every server goes off. Because it is centralised, without centralisation of storage current tools can't provide failover. So vendors picked having crappy IO because it's much cheaper than replication... downside is it doesn't work good, it's very unstable.

    2. There are no tools. SQL databases won't scale AT ALL. NoSQL databases are immature and often loose data or break (mongo). nodeJS can't scale efficiently beyond ONE (!) CPU core. Suitable languages (like Erlang) are completely different paradigm, very little people uses them.

    3. Now the big lie of clouds. You CAN'T have scalability and failover out of the box. Even if you had 2 previous components (true cloud stack and tools that could use it)... you still need to write code with scalability, replication and failover in mind.

    For today, clouds just doesn't work. They're (at best) as good as any low-grade dedicated server with raid1, but much more expensive.

    Eg. after amazon f*up... everyone said "yes websites went offline but you should spread your app across the world"... the small detail is that currently there is no technology that allows it (!)

    Of course every cloud provider will tell you "my cloud is the real one"... in fact they CANNOT even provide stable I/O, which any dedicated server will do. Not to mention scalability or failover.

    For now there is no SINGLE programming language or storage technology designed for this kind of "web cloud" that is RELIABLE. There is software in C++ designed to do highly parralell and distributed processing but that's designed not for web but for computation. And again if you don't design the algorithm for parrallelism and failover it won't work.
    Last edited by slawek22; 06-19-2012 at 06:08 PM.

  21. #96
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    Dub,Lon,Dal,Chi,NY,LA
    Posts
    1,839
    To be fair Slawek, you are (still) looking at extremes.

    For the average user with a web app or web site, current cloud IAAS with some planning delivers and works great, while saving money.

    We move dozens of customers a week from just one dedicated provider, as the customers get a lot more for their dollar on cloud.

Page 4 of 4 FirstFirst 1234

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 2
    Last Post: 05-31-2010, 12:02 PM
  2. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 05-10-2010, 12:43 PM
  3. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 10-06-2004, 07:23 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •