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Thread: Cloud Computing
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07-15-2008, 08:22 PM #1Newbie
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Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is getting hotter in the hosting industry. Is it necessary to open a "Cloud Computing Hosting" forum ?
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07-15-2008, 08:26 PM #2Web Hosting Guru
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Count me as a vote for it
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07-15-2008, 08:47 PM #3Owner of the net for a day
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Instead of crowding the place up with all these forms just add it to the description on this forum:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=123
it is a specialty market in every way.
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07-15-2008, 08:53 PM #4Retired Moderator
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Many things are "hot", but it doesn't mean there's enough to talk about them to warrant a dedicated forum. At this time, "clouds" are not there yet IMO. Not even "green hosting" is. Steve is right, many such discussions would fit snugly in the Specialty Hosting forum.
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07-15-2008, 09:18 PM #5Web Hosting Guru
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I agree there may not be much discussion about it, so the activity level may not warrant a dedicated forum. But I strongly disagree that it is a "specialty market" or "would fit snugly in the Specialty Hosting forum." When did Amazon come into the hosting industry with EC2, a year ago? Yet now they are the 800 pound gorilla!! How many industries have seen this kind of transformation so quickly?
AWS is only 1 or 2 forms of cloud computing, but I believe it's very clear cloud computing is the future of all types of hosting. Before long WHT will have their regular forums assumed to be discussing cloud-based solutions with Specialty Hosting being the old way.
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07-15-2008, 09:54 PM #6
What is cloud computing? Computers in heaven?
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07-15-2008, 10:17 PM #7Web Hosting Guru
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That's a good question (the first one) and could be one of many in a dedicated forum . There's the utility hosting aspect of cloud computing where you pay for what you use. If you use 3gbytes of storage for 1 hour, you only pay for that exact amount. This simple concept actually has pretty amazing consequences and allows individuals to potentially build enormous websites or services as this article from Microsoft called "Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage" demonstrates:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix0...tml/index.html
The other major notion of cloud computing is the idea of putting data or an application on a provider's cloud and all administration is taken care for you in a way that is fault tolerant and scalable. Google App Engine caters to this market.
Does anyone really see a future for traditional hosting without those 2 concepts above? Amazon disrupted this market and nobody is looking back. What's the percentage of serious startup companies today not using Amazon or a similar cloud/utility hosting company? Not very high.
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07-16-2008, 12:21 AM #8Retired Moderator
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What's the percentage of serious startup companies today not using Amazon or a similar cloud/utility hosting company? Not very high.
Before long WHT will have their regular forums assumed to be discussing cloud-based solutions with Specialty Hosting being the old way.
I'm not advocating skipping #2, I just don't think we're there yet.
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07-16-2008, 12:47 AM #9Web Hosting Guru
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Jeff Bezos says he doesn't know of a single serious startup who doesn't use Amazon's utility hosting platform (with the assumption that serious means smart). I doubt he's stretching the truth . I forget what his exact words were, but he did actually say this. And I have to admit, I believe him. Obviously not 100% of startup companies ("serious" or not) are using Amazon's hosting services, but the vast majority of new companies I talk with are using them. Maybe I just happen to talk with strange people...
I agree with you. We're not there yet... not enough discussions in the other forums on cloud computing.
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07-16-2008, 10:14 AM #10Web Hosting Master
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07-17-2008, 08:16 PM #11Newbie
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I can see more and more people are looking for cloud computing hosting, include myself Dedicated server is too expensive and difficult for Web apps that needs a lot of computing power. I need to buy a load banlancer, a couple of computing server, a couple of database servers and serveral backup servers. I need to take days to setup the load banlancer and automate the backup procedures. With cloud computing, it is much easier. All the work are done by the hosting company and what I need is upload my apps.
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07-17-2008, 08:34 PM #12Web Hosting Master
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I say what took so long?
I'm onto Hy Cloud Computing now.
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07-18-2008, 03:02 AM #13Web Hosting Guru
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Right now, nobody is quite sure See this thread on Slashdot, its rather funny.
Resources on demand that are granted on a distributed network of machines is nothing new. What is new is the introduction of various types of virtualization technology into the mix, such as Xen.
Many ISVs have come up with products that dynamically partition and configure virtual servers across a distributed farm.. however this is not 'grid' computing .. its dynamically allocating, provisioning and configuring virtual servers across a distributed farm. That sentence is kind of hard to fit on a software box.
The boys in marketing decided that 'grid' should be replaced by 'cloud' so that they could write their own definition. Now they're off to define it.
The cloud alludes to the distributed farm. If a user wants 3 SQL servers, 3 HTTP servers and a load balancer, the 'cloud' grants it. Likewise, your personal cloud within the cloud can expand and constrict as needed .. you typically pay only for what you use. Memory is metered sort of like electricity in most cases, as is CPU consumption. Your storage becomes its own object. You can connect all the pieces together any way you like (usually) with an ajaxified drag and drop interface.
As it stands now, if you hear "Cloud" while discussing computing, its probably because a software vendor just farted in your data center. Other terms are 'disposable infrastructure' , 'on demand computing', 'utility computing' and more. Some vendors even use all of the buzzwords just to get their point across.
Its really just a glorified term for putting virtualization to work as it was designed to work, while writing software that distributes user quotas and extends them to take RAM and CPU usage into consideration.
Gotta love these buzzwords I'm not saying its FUD, but it is (mostly) a marketing ploy to simplify the explanation of the underlying technology.
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07-18-2008, 03:37 AM #14Web Hosting Master
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Cloud just sound so much nicer than farm or grid.
Farm sounds like there would be farm animals. Dirty and stinky.
Grid sounds like the power grid. Gives you cancer and danger zone.
Cloud sounds so heavenly. Soft, light, and so fluffy. Natural and waste no resources. Nice.
PS: Above me is an ad from WebAir with pictures of Clouds.
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07-18-2008, 03:42 AM #15
Where I live, clouds usually spell thunderstorms and power outages
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07-18-2008, 04:09 AM #16Web Hosting Guru
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07-18-2008, 04:14 AM #17Web Hosting Master
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07-18-2008, 04:37 AM #18Web Hosting Guru
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So that makes clients .... ? oh dear, we better stop before this really de-generates into a juvenile noise making contest.
What really disappoints me about most things that are being developed called 'cloud' is as follows:
* Nobody extends quotas to make them distributed and account for ram/cpu entirely in userspace. Everyone wants to touch the kernel and get married to a specific version
* Nobody has made the privileged tools needed to talk to the hypervisor safely available to underprivileged users (comes back to gripe #1), even though low level libraries for hypercalls are available (i.e. libxc). It should be 'just another part of linux', not some kind of 'layer'.
* Nobody has really simplified attaching storage in a universal way.
* Nobody has really simplified automatic imaging / provisioning of nodes (not virtual machines, the servers that support them)
* Not many have been able to put controls into a UI in a way that average users find intuitive.
Could I do any better? Possibly, but it would take a lot of time. Everyone seems to be in a rush to get _something_ to market, even if its held together by duct tape.
I have great hopes for Ovirt, they have really done a nice job and built an extensible system. It currently only supports KVM, however since they built around libvirt Xen and others are not hard to incorporate.
Since 'privacy in the cloud' is such I hot topic, I'd be willing to bet it will be open source, not proprietary vendors who really end up defining 'cloud'.
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07-20-2008, 04:54 AM #19Web Hosting Master
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Kids always find flactuants to be funny. I wouldn't be surprised if there's going to be a serious host catering to kids, yeh I've seen some small ones, but nothing big yet.
Cloud hosting, pay as you go, whatever, seems to expensive at this stage IMO.Recommended: Stablehost, Hivelocity, Fused
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07-20-2008, 05:25 AM #20Web Hosting Guru
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Google's App Engine is free. Utility server (and virtual server) providers are all pretty competitively priced on a per machine basis. But if you need more than one server, the utility and elastic nature of utility hosting make it FAR less expensive than the cheapest hosts in the world.
So I'm not sure where you see cloud hosting as expensive. Cloud hosting is a major disruptive force in the hosting world primarily because it makes hosting costs so cheap that many businesses and technologies are now feasible where they weren't before. There are many other benefits as well, but cost is a huge one.
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07-20-2008, 10:24 PM #21Web Hosting Master
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I don't think the 'cloud' quite has the market presence at this point in time to deserve it's own forum. At the current time, it's a bit of a niche type service, that fits quite nicely into the existing forums.