Why We Moved Off The Cloud
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Why We Moved Off The Cloud
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Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#2Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little.
It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for:
1) Short lived instances or "now" instances.
2) and... what?
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#3Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
The recent High Scalability article outlining the Stackoverflow and Stackexchange network is worth a read.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/10/24/stackexchange-arc...
Joel makes some good points on why they stayed with physical hardware.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#4Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
> I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
smaller businesses where economies of scale don't kick in, and/or smaller businesses that want to hedge their bets on growth.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#5If this trend picks up, there's a good business opportunity if someone comes up with a way to combine the best of the cloud with the best of dedicated hosting.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#6Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
> I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short. smaller businesses where economies of scale don't kick in, and/or smaller businesses that want to hedge their bets on growth.
Even Dropbox, a cloud company, uses Amazon S3.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#7Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
There's different versions of "the cloud". See my article here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computing-services
In short, "cloud" services (aka Software as a Service in the cloud) are brilliantly useful. No one will seriously question the usefulness of Dropbox, for example.
Platform-as-a-Service is also obviously useful. Google App Engine is qualitatively different from running your own hardware.
Infrastructure as a Service is useful too, if you know how to use it, but in a more limited set of circumstances. The circumstances where it's useful include things like: having an event-based site (e.g. a site related to a sport event) which will need a lot of hardware for a short time and not much afterwards; an app where, due to your solid marketing channels, you expect fairly rapid and unpredictable growth of the usage and you will need to provision new servers quickly; an app where the load varies significantly throughout the day or the week (e.g. something that does batch processing of a lot of data on a regular basis, but is idle the rest of the time).
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#8The cloud became the new hot thing and lots and lots of people, sites, enterprises jumped on board. Need to quickly deploy code without any understanding of how infrastructure works? Great, the cloud solves your problem! Who needs experienced infrastructure people anyway? Need to quickly respond to a spike in traffic? Great, the cloud solves your problem! Need guaranteed SLAs, reliable CPU, memory and disk performance? Yeah good luck with that. The price, at any sort of reasonable scale, of the cloud is almost always more expensive than doing it yourself (VMs). Cloud computing is completely bad but it's not the panacea that too many people make it out to be.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#9Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
I think it depends what you mean by 'beats'. In term of performance bare metal will always win, and in a stable situation it can even work out economically.
Where the cloud comes in useful is when you're just starting out and have no idea what kind of demand you should be planning for. Are you going to get swamped? If so, no big deal- spin up a few more machines. If not, you're sitting pretty. Making those kinds of changes with a bare metal setup takes time.
All this said, I am surprised by the number of successful, profitable companies that still use the cloud. Once you know your numbers and have a reasonable outlook for the future you should at least investigate getting some hosting of your own.
Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud
#10Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little. It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for: 1) Short lived instances or "now" instances. 2) and... what? I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.
Like the blog says, CPU is fairly cheap on the cloud. Memory is fairly expensive and normally good disk IO cannot be purchased (Bytemark's BigV looks different in this regard). We have a service (http://www.mynaweb.com/) that has a bunch of mostly CPU bound services and a few IO bound ones. We also want the CPU bound services to be near to customers. It makes sense for us to acquire cheap cloud instances around the world for the CPU bound services and keep the IO bound stuff on dedicated hosts.