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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
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
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.