A walk down memory lane

2009-08-28 @10:43pm

Let's take a walk down memory lane... Remember when setting up a server involved downloading a Linux distro, burning it onto CD and finally installing and configuring various options? Today I signed into my Rack Space Cloud account, clicked on the Hosting tab, then Cloud Servers, selected my preferred distro and pressed the “Add New Server” button. Less than five minutes later my new server was ready for use. Two minutes later I installed a package that my software requires (using apt-get) and Cocosci Node10 was ready for use.

This actual (true) scenario is similar to the process I enjoy at Slicehost.com and Amazon EC2. The ease of deployment is made possible by advances in server virtualization. In the case of RackSpace and SliceHost the process similarity isn't surprising considering RackSpace acquired SliceHost last October. The synergy shows and while it's not exactly magic, Clark's third law comes to mind: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

A walk in the clouds

2009-08-27 @8:55pm

Over the past year I've kept an eye on cloud computing developments. This month I've resumed seriously investigating a few available offerings. Much of what I'll write about here may not be strictly considered cloud computing, so I'm sticking to the Wikipedia definition with a focus on "infrastructure as a service" and "platform as a service".

I began experimenting with Amazon EC2 instances but found them too costly for my purposes. This lead me to less expensive alternatives, such as SliceHost.com. During the past few months I've utilized SliceHost VPS slices for use with my social networking experiment. Slicehost has been a real pleasure to use. I especially appreciated the slice cloning feature – it's down right addicting – sadly, my budget kept me in check

Computing resources are only one aspect of my current needs, data storage and content delivery are others. In the past few months I've had to migrate from hosting a few sites on a single VPS to dedicated hosting. The underlying reason was the computational costs of content delivery. To alleviate the situation I've moved content to Amazon's CloudFront service, a content delivery network which sits on top of Amazon S3. Getting my content onto the CloudFront service wasn't easy. CloudFront doesn't offer an FTP service, so you need a dedicated client too capable of signing into CloudFront and copying content. My first attempt involved using the S3Fox client which runs as a FireFox plugin. S3Fox is a great plugin. Sadly, for large amounts of data it proved too slow. After several days of 24/7 data transfers followed by a hang I was forced to consider alternatives. I discovered CloudBerry Explorer while reviewing twitter feeds. CloudBerry is clearly a better tool if you have large amounts of files to transfer. Other than that… I haven't used the product long enough to expound its benefits, although I can envision becoming a paying customer of the pro edition at some point.

At this point I'm investigating the RackSpace Cloud. For my needs, it may be an even cheaper service than SliceHost. Other players are readying their cloud offerings. I expect to explore Microsoft's Azure service as it matures.