Slashdot Mirror
Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains
1sockchuck writes "Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow an incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations."
I think the CouchDb devs would actually disagree: I've heard a few of them (janl and jchris) refer to what they do as "ground computing" rather than "cloud computing." I can't speak for them but I think their goal is a more user peer-to-peer architecture than a client-server arch (where in the server is a proprietary cloud).
The goals of the CouchDb project sometimes seem to extend further then just a RESTful database system...
Caveat, I've never actually used cloud computing, just talked to people and seen presentations.
The story I got was from a guy who does IT consulting, and does a lot of prototyping for new/potential clients. He would use the Google or Amazon clouds to spin up an application, play with it, demo it to the clients, and then spin it down. If it went live, they could either leave it in the cloud, or capitalize a "real" hosting solution. He claimed that his bill some months for the cloud was less than $1.
And that's the point that I think people miss. If you're messing around with The Next Big Web 2.0 thing, but don't expect a lot of traffic to begin with, why go through the hassle of setting up a traditional hosting solution? How many racks will you need? How much bandwidth? How much memory and CPU? And if it gets suddenly more popular than you expect, how long does it take to get new servers online?
With cloud hosting, you can say "I want to pay, at most, $2000 a month." The service can then dynamically scale you up to your limit if you get on Slashdot or something. And if not, you just pay for what you're using, not for a rack of servers that are sitting 99% idle.
Exactly. I work at a popular video hosting website, and we do just that. Our encoding mechanism scales up and down depending on the number of videos requiring encoding. The fewer videos we get, the less we pay, as less equipment is being used. If we had our own racks, we'd be shelling out thousands to begin with, and then hundreds more each month. With cloud computing, our bills can be fantastically low, but are never fantastically high.