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Amazon, MS, Google Clouds Flop In Stress Tests
Eponymous writes "A seven month study by academics at the University of New South Wales has found that the response times of cloud compute services of Amazon, Google and Microsoft can vary by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day services are accessed. One of the lead researchers behind the stress tests reports that Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud services have limitations in terms of data processing windows, response times and a lack of monitoring and reporting tools."
Cloud free and lightning fast!
Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science told iTnews she was excited by Cloud Computing as it could potentially enable organisations to "outsource a certain amount of their risks and costs and tap into new economies of scale."
Sounds more like she has a degree in buzzword engineering.
I wonder what the implications will be for Wave? Real-time updates across multiple servers present very similar challenges to cloud-computing. If the relevant protocols have the same problems then it raises doubts over the scalability of the Wave protocol.
Meta will eat itself
So, what exactly does "cloud computing" bring to the table for me?
Not much as far as I can see, other than a new crop of buzzwords.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
IMO the entire cloud thing is nothing more than a hype. Noone ever got asked if he wanted to have all apps running as webservices. Google, MS and others just race each other without really having a look whether the customers will buy. And i don't even want to think of the bad choice of standards they base their services on...
I foresee a unplanned and totally random 'Software Audit' at the University of New South Wales in the near future!!!
Google AppEngine has data reporting to a ridiculous level. This article doesn't even publish any REAL data.
I really HATE commercicles, small articles which make a claim, and then say, 'stay tuned!'.
Someone fire the author. The last paragraph reads:
"Liu will present the findings and offer developers advice on how to build robust applications to withstand the cloud's limitations at the Australian Architecture Forum in Sydney on Monday, August 24."
Wow, I at least they admit that this article has no REAL data in it, and THAT data will be released on Monday.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Of course this is not surprising if you assume most of its users are in same timezone and do their work between 9-17. Clouds only work if the work of its clients is distributed over time, you can then aggregate dedicated resources for tasks. A cloud can not (never) properly deal with socalled peak load without making sufficient investments into hardware. Peak load occurs when everybody start using the system at the same time for intensive processing or data transactions. This is more likely to occur if your users are in the same timezone. So if your are looking for a 'good' cloud I suggest also looking at the user list. If the users are sufficiently distributed over different time zones it might scale better (this is of course not the only criteria for a good cloud). I myself prefer 'Thunder clouds' :)
Small suggest, next time, read the article before you comment. Your comment has *0*% bearing on what this is talking about.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I only have 5 Apple .mac/.me accounts and even Apple knows that the rollout was so flawed that they gave us extra time on our contracts for the deficiencies.
Apple is getting better, but ISPs are choking upload speeds (even my business account that I pay $200/Mo for 6 megabits up and down) shows far slower data rates up over down to/from Apple.
Buh? As far as I can tell, Google doesn't have a platform called "AppLogic". Perhaps they were referring to App Engine? And it's not even the editors' fault this time -- TFA has the terms wrong too. That really inspires confidence...
My Systems
I can't help thinking this is just thin-client + mainframe again, and just like every other time the model has come around, it's being pushed as the future.
it would be an offense punishable by ban if when referring to the cloud, members didnt roll their eyes and make fart noises.
cloud is becoming less and less of a "news for nerds" thing because its surrounded by nothing but business jargon instead of tech talk. outsource your risks?? I still manage the same servers, in the same datacenter, with the same network but for some reason its been abstracted to "cloud" computing. you aren't outsourcing any new. theres still a guy you call at 5 AM when the mysql servers arent replicating properly, or the amanda job is hung.
a PRIME example, this article has NO NUMBERS!! no quantifiers or methods by which they tested the aformentioned services. they only say things were bad when one group of university students half a world away tested them. the university doesnt even mention the study!
and at seven months of presumably unauthorized stress testing, i wouldnt be surprised if google and amazon network engineers met over a few pints of beer and decided your asinine experiment deserved a bit of traffic shaping.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said.
Ok, so give me a friggin' number! Did it go from 1 min to 20 minutes? Or from 1 sec to 20 sec. Or 1 hr to 20 hrs? When did you experience these response times? Give me a graph showing the response time as function of time of day and day of week.
I am learning to hate articles that give you a little bit of information and leave out the important data. If Ms. Liu hasn't released the data, then the article should not have been written. Or she should provide it on her web page. Or provide a link to some journal where it's being published. This whole thing stinks of spin and MS FUD.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
I'm not surprised that these 'Johnny-come-latelys' are having issues. M (Mumps) has had an integrated schemaless database for forty years now and has the tool chain to go with it. The language and the data structure are seamlessly integrated, a concept that was all but wiped out by the relational database movement of the 70's. It's a shame to see this emphasis on schemaless databases is so totally ignorant of both its prior history and the lessons that Mumps has to offer. Ignorance is bliss...
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
It just depends on the application. Webmail is an obvious success; why have every company re-creating this capability when everybody needs and wants the same thing? There is the issue of trust, but then, we do put our money in banks, so that is solvable.
I dunno. If someone steals my money, it can be replaced by the bank whose security system failed. If someone steals my secrets, there is no remedy.
I don't really see how this is similar to the cloud at all.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are a number of arguments both for and against cloud computing. Performance and cost aside, it just seems to be an introduction of more single points of failure in your infrastructure.
In a standard site infrastructure model if your mail server takes a dump, yeah, you're not getting mail. Same with routers, power, etc. We all get that.
Now introduce clouds for your services and add in firewalls, physical broadband pipes (T1, or whatever), broadband service provider and all their hardware/personel/etc, and any other broadband service providers that host traffic to your destination (and their hardware/service/personel/etc). There's a host of things that are added that, if broken, sever your business's ability to perform. And we havent even gotten to the company that has the hardware and services that actually host the cloud.
The bottom line is the argument between what is more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately the accountants dont factor in downtime for every employee when things break. They only factor in the check they know with certainty that has to be written every month. Yeah, on paper you probably save a bunch of money to go with a cloud. In reality you're not making any money with all your employees sitting around with their thumbs in their asses a couple of times a week.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
You're confusing two definitions of "cloud".
One is the idea of putting everything into a webservice. The other is the idea of utility computing. They often overlap, but plenty of web services run their own datacenters, and there are plenty of applications of utility computing beyond web services.
Specifically, your "scalability issues" are relevant to the "utility computing" part, but not so much to the "web services" part -- unless you were bringing up issues completely irrelevant to this article.
This is my main annoyance with the use of the word "cloud" -- even people with some technical knowledge still get fooled into thinking one kind of "cloud" has anything at all to do with another type of cloud.
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