Cloudscaling - Latest Comments

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

davesmithcloud — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 06:28:39 -0000

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Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

James Watters — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:46:26 -0000

@randybias

Interesting, I've been talking to VMware a fair amount and I want them to really sparkle on vCloud not just persist in their virt domination. I'll watch for your vCloud blog.

Re: Clouds Are Inherently Self-Service

randybias — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:32:41 -0000

@botchagalupe

Thanks for the kind words and comment, John. I think you're just adding clarification about what makes the power of 'self-service' so important.

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

randybias — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:17:45 -0000

@James Watters

Thanks for such a thoughtful and well written response. I think what is missing is that, at least in the enterprise, there won't be a fragmentation. It's going to be all VMware all the time. There is still no credible contender to the upcoming vCloud product and I've looked at everything in a fair bit of detail now. I say this as someone who would far prefer to see an open standard. Regardless, a de facto standard for enterprise clouds will mean that hosting providers who also use vCloud will have the possibility for very strong integration to internal enterprise clouds. In fact, I have a large blog posting I'm working for just this subject. The real fragmentation you outline will exist more within the public clouds realm than the enterprise.

Interface/API/arch standards are very important to me. That's why I released the GoGrid API under an open license, which then caused Sun and RackSpace to follow suit. It also inspired a lot of the work on the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) API.

Absolutely agree with the thrust of your comment, but don't think these dangers actually exist. Enterprises are going to adopt vCloud. There's nothing else on the horizon for them. A de facto standard (like the Cisco IOS command line interface) is, practically speaking, as good as any open standard.

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

James Watters — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:39:49 -0000

Ok so I guess James U loves this so I'm interested. I think its a good defense of the necessity of competition in the cloud world--in this case between roll your own and outside providers. Got it--esp with Eucalyptus why not compete? Agree!

What REALLY worries me is that we aren't talking standards in this discussion. What keeps me up at night is the fragmentation of cloud development models and how some misguided enterprises might go for the overkill button yet again in making their own clouds which end up being incompatible with other providers.

Are interface/api/architecture standards important to anyone else here or is it just me? I think its a simple point to say you can compete internally to provide those standards--but its a HUGE problem if you say you are going to create your own.

With projects like Boto and Libcloud there will be an increasingly important ecosystem of cloud tools (built on standards).

I'm not trying to be alarmist--but I know for a fact that many big banks during the grid era spun their wheels for a long time rolling their own standards..etc.

Thanks

@wattersjames

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

esturkana (esturkana) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:59:12 -0000

The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing http://bit.ly/14MJym

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

randybias — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:30:30 -0000

@Eric Novikoff

Eric,

Thanks for your comment. You are correct that Amazon needs to keep some capacity available for burst; however, this capacity can be as low as 20%. In addition, as your pool gets larger the % of reserved capacity shrinks. At Amazon's current scale they likely need only 15% or less excess capacity in each availability zone. Also, FYI, I have spoken to many of the original EC2 team and the excess capacity is nowhere near 66%. It's roughly 20%, as it is for most cloud providers.

I do not know Amazon's margins, but I suspect them to be at least 50% or higher. In addition, the common trend I'm seeing right now is that hosting providers do the math and realize that cloud computing is a much, much, better business that dedicated servers. There are major efficiency gains for both capex and opex. In capex and opex, because using homogeneous hardware allows buying in bulk and also reduces costs associated with stocking parts and equipment for many configurations. There are major advantages to the hosting providers as well in the costs associated with running the cloud compared to a traditional hosting facility.

I'm confused about what you are describing. You're comparing managed VPSes vs. unmanaged VPSes. A managed VPS is more of a managed service product than a straight VPS product. If you abstract away all of the management then of course customers won't care. Regardless, I know for a fact that Amazon is eating away at the VPS market and that larger players see this and are responding to it.

I agree with your premise about the value of managed services and abstracting the underlying cloud further. It's absolutely true that there is major value here and likely an area of ENKI's focus, I presume. Regardless, customers will choose what they want and while many want the problem to just go away, others are looking for the ability to get into the guts because they have special requirements. These are typically not the same VPS customers however, but larger web application businesses that need secret sauce.

Best,

--Randy

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

Eric Novikoff — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:25:33 -0000

There are some serious problems with the cheerleading for AWS going on here. Clearly Amazon has to keep large numbers of servers idle and ready for use to provide the value proposition of massive scalability. Yet, the cost of that overhead (estimated to be 66% by some) doesn't seem to appear on their prices. It's because they're buying the market. And they can afford to. But I don't think it's realistic to base one's business plan on those prices remaining low. And now here we have a discussion about replacing VPSes with EC2. I think it's a long way off. The VPS providers have been honing their economics for much longer than Amazon, often starting with budget Cpanel or colo offerings. Their prices are insanely low - and often (like Amazon in some respects) it truly is insane in that you're getting less than you pay for.

I also disagree with the high value of control. We have quite a few erstwhile VPS customers in our cloud and what they want is not control but the opposite: freedom from having to be in control. They want us to manage everything: administration, auto-scaling, incident response, etc. Software has progressed to the point where you can run a high tech business successfully if only you could get away from the whole administration racket, but here we have Amazon training a new generation of "cloud administrators."

I think VPSes will be here for a long time, both due to their price advantages as well as the fact that they have more mature support models.

Re: Clouds Are Inherently Self-Service

botchagalupe — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:25:48 -0000

Randy,

Thanks for this post. This is a good definition. However, I think there is another definition that is used in the enterprise for self service. What I have seen in the enterprise is the use of self service to isolate the technology from the customer. For example I have worked with one company where they have a SS portal that allows them, with an internal credit card, to select a blog, wiki, dev system, lamp stack from the portal. The have no idea if they are getting VMware, AWS, or bare metal and it doesn't matter to them. Other examples are engineering teams selecting analytic clusters by selecting a. number of cpus, b. how much memory, and c. bandwidth. Again, they get the resources and they don't know or care about the platform.

I also have built a few self service portals using this same concept to abstract monitoring technology. I had one client where all of their internal customers hated Tivoli. We built a self service portal around all of their monitoring tools. They where then able to select the hosts and the resources they wanted to monitor and every one was happy. They also reduced head count.

Again, thanks for this post. I can see now why I got so much push back from my tweets last night. You are the Bomb...

john
johnmwillis.com

Re: My Top 5 Cloud Posts in H1 2009

Varna — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:09:01 -0000

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Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

randybias — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:57:10 -0000

@John Polgreen

Thanks for your comment John. Please share more information if you can. I would love to learn more about what the government is doing.

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

John Polgreen — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:44:05 -0000

Great treatment of the subject. The Federal government is already using the cloud extensively, and much of this usage is internal. Much of their reasoning revolves around security and privacy, in addition to the factors you mention.

Re: The ‘Cloud’ Is NOT Outsourcing

mrbuelow (MrBuelow) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:41:00 -0000

Please RT: @randybias The ';Cloud' Is NOT Outsourcing http://tinyurl.com/lt9ls9

Re: Cloud-Based Scalability Testing

Randy Hayes — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:41:31 -0000

Hi Randy, I wanted to say how much I agree with you in the "performance vs. scalabiity) matter you mention here. At CapCal we also do cloud-based scalability testing and I try to go to great pains to educate people about the differences. Stop by and look at our blog sometime for a few examples! http://capcalblog.blogspot.com.

Thanks!

Re: The Secret Sauce Problem

geetanjalid (Geetanjali Dighe) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:34:38 -0000

There is no future in vanilla for companies in a flat world. From The world is Flat.RT: @DailyCloud Secret Sauce http://tinyurl.com/lpru7b

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

Anonymouse — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:11:56 -0000

This jives with the marketing term "Whole Product". Would you buy a PC if the case were welded shut and you couldn't upgrade the CPU/RAM/HD? Probably not, or at least you'd expect a discount.

The same thing applies to VPS vs Cloud. The VPS "product" doesn't have all the features of a cloud. Even if the customer doesn't want to invest in auto-scaling/code-as-infrastructure/fault-tolerence/etc right now, the customer may be willing to invest in "easy migration path to auto-scaling/etc down the road". The customer pays an extra $10-$20 per month right now, but saves the pain of migrating from a VPS to a cloud provider next year.

Worse news for the VPS vendors is that they are fragmented (tools, walk-thrus, how-tos, resources, etc.) compared to the "one" AWS. That means customers may be willing to pay a premium for AWS. Are we ready to say "nobody ever got fired for choosing AWS"?

I totally agree that AWS hasn't even started to tap that market (and they could/should/will).

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

Ellen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:41:33 -0000

Those are some amazingly low prices. I imagine they will be bought up by people who have had a successful site for less than a year and aren't that experienced.

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

dcsalesservices (Data Center S — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:17:38 -0000

Amazon threatens VPS market:http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazon-threatens-vps-market

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

erincarter (Erin Carter) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:41:54 -0000

Please RT: @randybias Amazon Threatens VPS Market http://tinyurl.com/mbxonu

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

virtual_host (Virtual Hosting — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:02:50 -0000

Amazon Threatens VPS Market | Cloudscaling http://tinyurl.com/mbxonu

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

randybias — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:55:40 -0000

Wade, great point. Yes, cPanel on these smaller instances would go a long way towards further accelerating this change.

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

randybias — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:54:34 -0000

Steve, that's not a contradiction. That's a great observation. Certainly you are right about low end customers wanting customer support. This is almost certainly why many of them pick a GoGrid or Rackspace Cloud for their VPS needs rather than an Amazon. Certainly any well-formulated strategy here will complement allowing self-service cloud VPS replacement with a strong support service. Here I think GoGrid and Rackspace have an advantage with their service team models.

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

Wade M — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:53:16 -0000

Totally agree! I've got a few VPS servers and from time to time look over to AWS looking to see if they've added a cheaper, more VPS like option.

A Image running CentOS & cPanel OOTB will change the VPS landscape entirely.

Re: Amazon Threatens VPS Market

Steve — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:22:09 -0000

Good article, always well thought out. I have an observation that contradicts some of your statements, so you can make what you want out of it. Customer's want automation when it's convenient, not all the time. They want it when they are building servers and customizing images, but they don't want it when sales is involved or when things aren't behaving. Your examples of success with amazon have outsourced components that deal with support (Rightscale?), which obfuscates this problem of customers who can't afford a tacked on support.

99.9% of all customers need the warm fuzzies of having someone to speak with when they have concerns that text on a page can't address. For instance, bandwidth. I can't imagine a customer would be comfortable signing up for a service that could potentially cost them thousands of dollars as a result of a hacker turning them into a spam bot or a DDos box.

I guess I'm saying that customer want the Billing model that amazon presents, not necessarily the product. Thanks for the article Randy!

Re: Hadoop 101 by Chris Wensel

lusciouspear — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:16:00 -0000

This is a pretty good intro to the Hadoop world! I like how you mention avoiding 'sharding' and the pains of RDBMSs.

I think you might like an article I wrote on the pitfalls of sharding and RDBMSs on my blog -- http://www.roadtofailure.com . Let me know what you think :)