Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : How does Cloud work ?

[bluemediaprint]

Honestly even after being so long in hosting industry I am still not able to understand what is cloud? - how does it work? - what should I do if I need to form a cloud? - who needs cloud? and many more..

Can someone make this simple for me..

Also what control panel is good for cloud ? and who offers that

[ky0ung]

i think cloud hosting is simply the connection of multiple servers to form a connection of a bunch of websites. They usually charge differently than typical than typical hosting and its a cheaper alternative.

[InternalOptics]

Everytime I ask someone who has cloud services, I always ask the following:
"Is it me.. or is a cloud really just the latest keyword for vps on a cluster?" And I have always been told yes.
Sometimes the vps is restricted to the cpu it's hosting on, and has a chance to share memory/disk/cpu cycles accross the cluster. Other's, it is just a vps that does not get anything from the rest of the servers. It just happens to be limited to local resources, even though there is expansion possibilities.

Hope this helps!

[InstaCarma_Support]

A cloud is a collection of machines, a well designed or collection after proper planing.

Considering we need to deploy a heavy application, in the sense an application of huge size (database and other data), in this case deploying it on to a single server and maintaining will be a real tough task. Here comes the cloud in picture.

Initially, need a good understanding regarding the application, then plan properly and design a cloud architecture.

Like two database servers (along with High Availability and load balancing).
Web servers (along with load balancing).
Then servers with proper size, for other data and assets.

The intercommunication between the servers will happen as per the architecture of the cloud we choose. In most cases, there will be ssh-key authentication between the machines.

Finally, we can deploy the application on to the cloud and test.

So, the application is now serving from a cluster or cloudd of servers instead from a single one.

One of the most important ideas behind cloud computing is scalability, and virtualization is the technology that makes it possible.

[CloudWeb]

True cloud is definitely more than VPS. VPS first and foremost is not redundant, it's not high available, it's not vertically scalable beyond a single physical server, they're rarely running on an engine that is both redundant and high available across multiple physical servers, among other things.

Cloud is not just an operating system so if a provider just has some fancy OS and claims they are Cloud, they are not. If a provider just simply mirrors data (redundancy) and load balances it (high availability), it is not Cloud.

IMHO, the truest of true Cloud implementations will scale an application vertically beyond a single physical server, with redundancy, high availability, multi-redundant/ha shared storage, multi-redundant/ha networks (at ALL layers, including the switching), multi-redundant/ha operating layer/engine, be entirely provisioned, controlled, and managed from a web interface, a multi-tenant environment, and advanced QoS controls (to limit CPU/RAM/HDD/Network resources).

[arisythila]

How I sort of explain it to people when I explain our cloud is.

For example, You take 10 machines, CPU, Memory, and HDD space. And you sort of create this virtual environment (Cloud) Now if you add more machines to this environment, the cloud gets bigger, however, if you have a machine failure, that cloud just gets a little smaller, but does not cause your machines to crash.

I know we are Cloud hosters over here that have answered this question, however. I've noticed a lot of benefits going to this sort of infrastructure. 1. being that i don't have to worry about server failures. 2. everything pretty much trinkles down from that. Not getting calls at 2AM in the morning anymore. Our first grid has over a year of uptime on it, We will be upgrading it here soon.

Thanks,

[dazmanultra]

Originally Posted by CloudWeb

IMHO, the truest of true Cloud implementations will scale an application vertically beyond a single physical server,

The only applications that will do this are scientific/mathematical applications. Usually running on some specialised linux so that a bunch of blades or similar will appear to the application to be a single tightly integrated system. Vertical scalability is usually not the defining point of "cloud".

In fact, isn't vertical scalability almost the anti-thesis of cloud? Cloud to my mind is about horizontal scaling - scaling across multiple machines in multiple locations...

[CloudWeb]

horizontal is nice.. but vertical scaling is what makes an administrator's dream. AppLogic does in fact do this.

[InstaCarma_Support]

In short more than one servers, connected together with a ready to go substitute in place for each one.

[KDAWebServices]

Originally Posted by CloudWeb

horizontal is nice.. but vertical scaling is what makes an administrator's dream. AppLogic does in fact do this.

errrr.... no it doesn't, take it from someone who has been using it for well over a year that it doesn't do anything of the sort. AppLogic cannot make a single machine instance span multiple servers - sure it can make an application span multiple servers, but so can any cloud system, as in AppLogic an application it a collection of virtual machines each running their own specific task.

[CloudWeb]

I never said a server spans vertically.. but an application. Most other cloud systems cannot span an application vertically, at least nowhere near the levels that AppLogic can. I use it too and have used everything else as well.

[KDAWebServices]

You're not scaling the application vertically though are you? All you're doing is creating more VMs with specific roles i.e. web serving, DB etc. and then scaling those components out horizontally.

[CloudWeb]

The application does scale vertically. We just took one from 2 to 5 servers last week.

[KDAWebServices]

That isn't vertical scaling, that's horizontal scaling - unless the components see those 5 machines as one big system image, which they don't.

[CloudWeb]

It's all semantics...