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: 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: 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

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 :)

Re: Private Clouds Matter

David Chow — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:35:16 -0000

I think cloud computing is only a broad term which stands for:

'A computing methodology where it's based on the Internet, whereas, other key elements like Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) supporting this concept' (Shaw & Evans 2009).

It's private or not, doesn't matter at all. As long as CIO could make good use of this technology, develop a sustainable ICT strategy to cope with company's visions and missions does matter.

ICT strategy matters all.

Reference: Shaw, J & Evans, S 2009, Pro ADO.NET Data Services-Working with RESTful Data, Apress, US.

Re: Cloud Futures Pt. 2: Commodity Clouds

Kristoffer Sheather — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:54:06 -0000

Well, its always nice to be first, in whatever niche you are playing in :)

From the pricing analysis that I've done, Rackspace Mosso Cloud Servers is one of the cheapest commodity cloud offerings out there today, roughly on par with Amazon EC2. The monthly pricing for a Small EC2 instance is $72 / month, though that only includes ephemeral storage. Add elastic block storage and you are looking at $92 / month. Compare that to the Mosso 2GB instance at $87.60 / month. Mosso data transfers are slightly more expensive for outbound traffic at $0.22/GB compared to EC2 at $0.17/GB, inbound is cheaper though at $0.08/GB compared to EC2 at $0.10/GB. GoGrid is free on the inbound data transfers which is a great idea to get the punters uploading loads of data to make use of their storage service :)

According to Rackspaces most recent financial results they have over 40,000 customers on their cloud products: http://ir.rackspace.com/phoeni...

Re: Private Clouds Matter

scott_hammond — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:30:05 -0000

Yes, I like your emphasis on self-service and reducing friction. I am expanding that point to include a rich comparative catalog experience to further reduce friction and adding the controls and governance required to protect the corporate assets. Doing the wrong thing quickly doesn't help.

Re: Private Clouds Matter

randybias — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:05:50 -0000

Scott, thanks for your comment. I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I'm a little confused. I think what you are saying is that by using a service catalog combined with policy-based decisions you can optimize the self-service experience while also providing governance.

Is that right? If so, it makes perfect sense to me. I would consider all of that part of making the cloud self-service. Self-service is about reducing friction. What you describe further builds upon self-service.

Re: Private Clouds Matter

randybias — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:00:01 -0000

Ray, you're right, but it doesn't really matter which internal customer. The internal IT folks will need to deploy PaaS platforms to service the developers and web apps for the business users. We're still talking about self-service regardless of whether it's infrastructure, platforms, or applications.

And you're exactly right re: canned apps. We'll start seeing much broader adoption of the kinds of pre-canned apps-in-a-VM like those from VMware's VMA, rPath, Jumpbox, and CohesiveFT. This will be especially compelling once the market matures and image management systems get better.