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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)."
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.
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AFAICT, they aren't intended to. The deepest problems are software problems for which there is no general solution, only problem-specific solutions for each particular task; what they are intended to deal with is the hardware problem that having a scalable software solution is of limited value if you have a fixed pool of hardware and have to go through disruptive upgrades when you expand that pool of hardware (and deal with the associated capital costs.)
Cloud computing services are, largely, tools to help dynamically "right-size" hardware, changing it from a capital investment that requires predicting the future well to plan right to an operating costs that can be quickly adjusted based on changing needs. Complaining that they don't solve the fundamental problems of software scalability seems to be missing the point.
I run a small startup in the Boston area and have been using Amazon EC2 (plus S3, SQS, and the rest of the AWS family) for the last year. It's worked for us like a champ. A little downtime in the beginning plus some S3 outages, but with the right backup, failover, and restore procedures in place we've gotten reasonable uptime.
The big requirements for us were the following:
1. Ability to move our website (and code base) elsewhere if needed. Could be in-house, to another cloud provider, etc.
2. Minimize up-front cost and allow for massive scaling if needed
3. Cost competitive servers/computing over time
4. Cost competitive storage/disk over time
App Engine fails the first criteria, since (at least currently) you can't build a BigTable application on anything but Google App Engine. "Cloud computing" in general beat out traditional hosting on the second, third, and fourth points. I hadn't checked out GoGrid or AppNexus at the time, but other competitors (Sun, etc.) couldn't match Amazon's price-performance specs.
So, with all of those requirements, Amazon EC2 won out and I'm a happy customer.
Of the four, Google seems to be the most limiting, at least on the surface. If I understand correctly, Google's offering requires the app to be written in Python and it denies some Python functionality such as file writes.
Amazon's offering, sitting at the other end of the spectrum, allows you to run a full instance of Linux complete with root level access.
The other two are not as confining as Google but more restrictive than Amazon.
On a side note, spam raining from the cloud has become a problem for at least Amazon. Some blacklists are blocking IP addresses owned by Amazon's EC2. If you want to run a mail server in the cloud, it just might rain on your parade.
...any Web site filled with an endless stream of mostly forgettable comments trolling for reactions from the rival fans
I can't think of any site to fit that description...
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I think the best way i've heard it explained is:
"When details of implementation are sufficiently hidden away that you no longer have to think about them, people often draw a 'cloud' around it, just like you do with the internet where (most of us) don't have to worry about all the wires and the protocols but it's just there, and it just works.."
Cloud computing is trying to draw the same cloud around.. computing (resources), you don't have to worry about connectivity, electricity, how to make db's and file systems scale across systems.. it's an abstract cloud that's just there without having to worry about it.