[Beowulf] Cloud Computing (WAS Clustering VPS servers)

[Jonathan Aquilina]

I have mentioned cloud computing solutions in my thesis and there was a memo
put out by the EU over security of the cloud.

The biggest question in terms of legalities.

Who has jurisdiction over the data let's say if you end up in court.
Country where the business is based or where the data in the cloud is
stored.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Dagdigian [mailto:dag at sonsorol.org] 
Sent: 21 March 2013 17:40
To: Jonathan Aquilina
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Clustering VPS servers


Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
> I am venturing back to the cloud side again isn't cloud just a fancy 
> name for virtualized servers?

For vendors getting their margins and products destroyed by AWS and other
public/open infrastructure clouds like rackspace/openstack/etc. 
etc. your statement is often quite true.

When you run across someone trying to sell you  a "cloud" and dig a bit
deeper they rarely have anything to show beyond virtual servers and block
storage. A few might have an object store to offer as well but that is about
it. It's sad and pathetic but you see it every day.

The difference on real IaaS clouds like Amazon is incredibly stark when
compared to the pretenders and marketers.

I think AWS has more than 30+ separate products all orchestrated by API
calls and the web management interface. It is the real deal. The capability
gains are impressive enough that we see people moving away from pure focus
on cost -- it's now possible to do stuff easily on AWS that would be pretty
darn hard to orchestrate/manage/deploy internally given how many useful
things Amazon has grafted an API onto.

  AWS used to have a nice comprehensive overview page but I can't find it
anymore so I'll just dump a few ...

EC2 - virtual servers on demand, via auction market or purchased up front in
various sizes, configs and global locations
S3 - globe spanning object store holding trillions of objects EBS - region
spanning block storage VPC - software or hardware defined VPNs that are
incredibly powerful and customizable Glacier - long term cold storage
service Redshift - data warehouse & analytics EMR - hadoop as a service RDS
- managed MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle, no DBA required SimpleDB - light
no-SQL datastore DynamoDB - fast noSQL datastore SQS - message passing SNS -
message passing SES - email service SWS - workflow tools CloudFormation -
orchestration and "stack" management Import/Export - terabyte scale data
ingest and export via shipped drives and arrays DirectConnect - peer
directly with Amazon

.. and that is only a small and non-representative list of what they have
running, in production, today.

On a feature by feature comparison many other cloud vendors look like
pathetic pretenders. At most they can offer compute and block storage. 
Nobody else can come close to the array that the bigger public IaaS clouds
are starting to push out.

Not trying to be an Amazon shill here - it's just a personal pet peeve of
mine due to many years of seeing vendors BS to me about their "magic cloud"
that turns out to be nothing more than a hypervisor and some trivial
orchestration tricks.  IaaS clouds make them look like jokes.


-Chris