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Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars
fdicostanzo writes "The folks at Mixpanel are leaving Rackspace's server cloud for Amazon and have left a little note about their reasons. There's been some talk that Rackspace's offering has not been up to snuff once you scale. Analysis suggests that Rackspace's offering still has some advantages however."
They missed the fact that RackSpace offers hybrid cloud options that Amazon just can't match at this point. Got IO issues? So did GitHub when they were running on Amazon's infrastructure. Know how they solved it? They moved to Rackspace and married the cloud for front-end with physical hardware for their IO intense workloads. It seems to me these guys may just be naive. They've probably only sidestepped their problems for now.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
The problem with these solutions is they sell you services like a prepaid phone company to abstract the real cost.
My company has done the math and unless you only need the capacity say, 3 hours out of the day, EC2 (and Rackspace) simply can't compete with running your own hardware. We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Also, Rackspace and Amazon sell Xen virtualization hosting. The software is open source and freely available if you want to use it for yourself. I just guess "Cloud Hosting" sounds better but it's not that hard to roll a similar setup if you want the scalability.
Cloud Computing is such a loosely-defined and heavily abused term that its "true meaning" is almost as open to interpretation as "Web 2.0," and virtualised resources are often included in the definition.
The ever-colloquial Wikipedia states that it "typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources" while Foldoc states that it is "A loosely defined term for any system providing access via the Internet to processing power, storage, software or other computing services."
I'm fine with people debating the issue of the term's definition and provenance, even with people saying that one meaning is correct and another isn't, but flatly denying the existence of controversy without bothering to cite your authority is not conducive to anyone's understanding. Please, explain your position rather than simply stating it.
Meta will eat itself
Seriously, get some good writers BESIDES yourself and get actors who can actually ACT! And while you're at it, less CGI would be good and a couple more space battles....eh...what?
Oh, 'The Cloud Wars' isn't the title of the next Star Wars movie? Oh, sorry.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
As far as I can tell, what you're looking for is just virtual hosting, with a few specific requirements. I would think you could find all of those requirements, although I'll concede that a lot of options available today kind of suck.
"Cloud Computing" in my understanding is in fact all about the automatic scaling. I want to do a proof of concept online, and then show it to a few potential clients. I want it to basically be turned off when I'm not using it, and scale up quickly if my clients start hammering it. I only want to pay for what gets used. If I'm not using it, sell that capacity to somebody else, and keep my costs down.
If your're a full-fledged business, and you want responsiveness, and you want to guarantee a certain level of service to your clients, then cloud hosting may not be the best bet, or even the cheapest. You could still use it for special cases though. I heard a neat example: this guy needed to convert several million images into thumbnails. He wrote a little service to do it, hosted it in the cloud, let it scale way up, and churned through all the images in a few days, and it cost him a few hundred bucks on his corporate credit card. The time and expense to set up dedicated servers for this one-off task would have been ridiculous.
Like every damn thing in computer science (and really, life) cloud computing is not the solution to all of our problems, and it's also not a complete waste of time. It's a useful tool, to be used when appropriate.
Ooo! Car analogy! If you commute every day by car, you should probably buy a car. If you take the train to work and just need the car for the occasional trip to Target, then a car-sharing service might work for you.
You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.
Rack Space cloud sites is true cloud hosting, You do not add servers, you just pay for CPU usage like you are buying bandwidth. It is expensive and you can not customize it, but it always works and scales to meet demand.
It is not a VM, where you can install your own OS, Web server, etc. It is a apache server, mysql clustered backend and varnish cache front end.
Great for Blog hosting, PHP applications, etc. We do about 8-10 million page views on it per month and like it for what it is,
If I had staff that needed to configure servers all day, it would be different, but for hosting large dynamic LAMP websites, it is great and reliable.
Andrew