EC2 Vs. App Engine Vs. GoGrid Vs. AppNexus

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."

Comments

The definition of cloud computing is still vague

[strider2k]

Even after reading the wikipedia article on Cloud computing, I still can't give a good definition of it. I know the general concept but if a non-tech person asked me to describe it, I'll give a blank stare.

Data centers will be like Cobol

[cryfreedomlove]

In ten years, corporate data centers will be like COBOL is today. There will still be a lot of legacy data centers manned by dinosaurs. The cool kids, young and old, will be in the cloud.

Wow

[BasharTeg]

Finally, a burst of common sense on the latest hype. Hosted servers have offered many of the benefits you get out of "cloud" computing for years, without locking you into a particular vendor or platform. With virtualization, you should be able to build your own images and farm them out to hosting companies, using your technology and platform of choice. Clustered ESX and SANs already give us the resource scalability we need for most systems, partitioning finishes the job. You can just pay a hosted server company to host your vmware image on their ESX cluster and scale up your storage as needed on their SAN. The key is that YOU build a scalable design.

I highly doubt a majority of businesses are going to lock themselves into one hosting provider's specific development platform just to take advantage of hosted servers that push themselves into the next layer.

Re:Wow

[BasharTeg]

You're right, I did have those confused.

So it sounds like you have hosted virtual servers and some hosted SAN storage. That's cool, and it's a smart way to do business.

It's only when people call it "cloud" and act like it's something crazy and new beyond a combination of virtualization and SAN storage, managed by someone else just doesn't seem like it's worth all this hype.

I have a Vmware ESX cluster. I have an EMC SAN. They're supported through contracts with my reseller. When there are problems, the high availability features of my ESX cluster and my EMC SAN protect me. When I need to add storage, like the 15TB of storage I just added, I add storage. When I need to add another ESX node to expand my CPU or memory availablility, I add another ESX node. Each time I do, my HA gets a little better too. I use pre-built virtual machines ("appliances") for certain things either from vendors or that I build myself, just like the images Amazon offers.

If you can find someone that hosts this for you, that's great. It would probably save a lot of headaches that people with real equipment on site have to deal with. There's probably quite a bit of cost savings associated. My only point is, this isn't a massive shift of computing as we know it, it's just a turn-key solution made out of existing parts. Nothing wrong with that under you hit the vendor lock-in part.

When you start replacing SQL with Amazon's SimpleDB or Google's database, just so you can have a hosted virtualization/SAN solution, you're probably locking yourself in too much. I think your use of Amazon's service makes the most sense, because you're taking advantage of the hosting without the lock-in.

OK, but let's look at the big picture

[dedazo]

Comparisons are OK, but let's look at reliability. EC2 is not the same as S3, but the recent fiasco with S3 and SQS should give people pause before considering using any other Amazon cloud services. Two of my clients were hit with this over the weekend.

I don't know what kinds of volumes (traffic and hosting) Google AE is handling at this point, but at this point I think I would trust Google more than Amazon. One of the issues with the S3 downtime for many people was the fact that Amazon itself (and all its properties) continued to run perfectly while all the sites that hosted images and other content with them failed. Does Google use its own infrastructure to host AE? I don't know, but if they do I'd trust them a hell of a lot more than AWS.

At this point I'm thinking I'm not going to recommend AWS anymore.

EC2 is pretty sweet

[donnyspi]

Just get the EC2 and S3 plugins for Firefox and it's really easy to fire up instances and manage them. Sure, there's a learning curve, but once you really get it, it's awesome.

Moving to ec2

[snuf23]

The cost analysis was really what did it versus our managed hosting plan (1/10th the cost per month). Auto scaling and healing of the application cluster was also a benefit. To scale with a traditional host meant getting locked into a contract for the added server(s).

One thing about ec2 is that it forces you to use best practices for disaster recovery. Instances don't commonly just "disappear" but you need to plan for it. Well tuned ec2 images can have your site up and restored from backup automatically within minutes.

ec2 / s3 is far from perfect and certainly won't meet everyone's needs. The downtime s3 has seen (like last weekend) would be devastating to some businesses. Of course even with a traditional host you may have downtime due to truck crash or other random act.

Re:I prefer Google for Cloud Computing...

[jlar]

"I've been looking into this a bit, and the amazon option seemed the best."

I also looked a bit into Google and Amazons offerings for at Python project. Google was definitely the cheapest and if I could squeeze my project into the limitations they have established I would have chosen it. Unfortunately it is not possible to install C and Fortran extensions to Python (due to security reasons, you can install pure Python modules). This was a showstopper for me.

The critique of not providing access to a local file system is in my opinion misguided. One of the main strongpoints of the Google service is the Google File System (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html). If you do not want to use it, you are probably not building a scalable and distributed web application anyway.

I found the Amazon offering too expensive for my project at this point. I ended up using a minor hosting provider specialized in my type of Python applications (webfaction.com) which does a great job but miss the distributed aspects of cloud computing (not that I need that feature at this point).