Comments on: Clouds Evolve: Dealing with Infrastructure Complexity http://diego.caravana.to/clouds-evolve-dealing-with-infrastructure-complexity/ Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:18:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Diego Caravana http://diego.caravana.to/clouds-evolve-dealing-with-infrastructure-complexity/#comment-17800 Diego Caravana Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:49:50 +0000 http://diego.caravana.to/?p=228#comment-17800 Thank you very much for your comment, well done! I'll take the time to respond to it with a full post because it helps me understand better what is a cloud and in which ways can be helpful and better than bare hardware/virtualization/shared hosting. Here I want to say only that cloud computing *is* different from shared hosting, like a programming language is different from assembly or an operating system is different from hardware, because it helps humans deal better with complexity. Thank you very much for your comment, well done! I’ll take the time to respond to it with a full post because it helps me understand better what is a cloud and in which ways can be helpful and better than bare hardware/virtualization/shared hosting.
Here I want to say only that cloud computing *is* different from shared hosting, like a programming language is different from assembly or an operating system is different from hardware, because it helps humans deal better with complexity.

]]> By: Rauno http://diego.caravana.to/clouds-evolve-dealing-with-infrastructure-complexity/#comment-17671 Rauno Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:36:00 +0000 http://diego.caravana.to/?p=228#comment-17671 Why I'm against cloud? There was a time when people was drive to buy hosting solution, and the one that had few money got 'shared hosting' solutions. To have a 'shared hosting' was something bad, poor performance, unknown infrastructure details, high dependency on hosting provider commercial and technical policies to guarantee the level of services. But one day some marketing guy had a very smart idea. He took the 'shared hosting' solution and start to refer to it as 'cloud services', and it become a cool solution :) ... amazing the power of marketing tools! Beside this joke (not really a joke honestly): cloud (let's call it as it has to be called: shared hosting) is a good solution if your application is not critical.From a system engineer point of view to administer a could (as for every virtualized\consolidated environment) is a mess. It does reduce costs in terms of hardware but it mean incomparable complexity in terms of monitoring, maintenance and analysis (expecially for performance). Took this together with the commercial aspect (the same 100 G of disk space sold to 20 different customers because they will never use it completely, but when this happen? and you know that this will happen at a certain point in time). First thing that happen when you have a virtualized\consolidated environment is that you start to experience random slowness, this is usually linked to latency and conflict on I\O resources (network and more frequently disks). When your service is hosted in a cloud you will never been able to discover where the bottleneck is and you will keep your random slowness after month and month of code review to try to identify the issue internally to the application. Shared hosting is good for non critical application (my personal web site is proudly on a shared hosting but I really do not care if it remains unavailable even for days and performance is really far far to be a concern for it) but critical application do require dedicated services, where it is possible to control the resource available and used (and for the same reason in most cases also a dedicated virtual platform is not enough but physical machines are required). Ciao Rauno Why I’m against cloud?

There was a time when people was drive to buy hosting solution, and the one that had few money got ‘shared hosting’ solutions. To have a ‘shared hosting’ was something bad, poor performance, unknown infrastructure details, high dependency on hosting provider commercial and technical policies to guarantee the level of services. But one day some marketing guy had a very smart idea. He took the ‘shared hosting’ solution and start to refer to it as ‘cloud services’, and it become a cool solution :) … amazing the power of marketing tools!

Beside this joke (not really a joke honestly): cloud (let’s call it as it has to be called: shared hosting) is a good solution if your application is not critical.From a system engineer point of view to administer a could (as for every virtualized\consolidated environment) is a mess. It does reduce costs in terms of hardware but it mean incomparable complexity in terms of monitoring, maintenance and analysis (expecially for performance). Took this together with the commercial aspect (the same 100 G of disk space sold to 20 different customers because they will never use it completely, but when this happen? and you know that this will happen at a certain point in time). First thing that happen when you have a virtualized\consolidated environment is that you start to experience random slowness, this is usually linked to latency and conflict on I\O resources (network and more frequently disks). When your service is hosted in a cloud you will never been able to discover where the bottleneck is and you will keep your random slowness after month and month of code review to try to identify the issue internally to the application.

Shared hosting is good for non critical application (my personal web site is proudly on a shared hosting but I really do not care if it remains unavailable even for days and performance is really far far to be a concern for it) but critical application do require dedicated services, where it is possible to control the resource available and used (and for the same reason in most cases also a dedicated virtual platform is not enough but physical machines are required).

Ciao

Rauno

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