If it's a personal DB, you'd probably not want to run it 24/7. Remember Amazon VMs are trivial to bring up and down, and you only pay while they're up.
If you're thinking about the backend for a personal Wordpress page (etc) this probably isn't the right platform.
I wonder if programming for cloud services will bring back the need for code that is optimized for speed (or using as little resources as possible), since you pay for the actual usage of these resources.
In server land, if you've got lots of clients, you were always paying for those resources. You max out a server, you have to buy another, or code something more efficient.
Usually, the cost of more computer resource is vastly lower than the cost of a programmer doing optimisation. Jeff Atwood has written frequently on the subject.
This surprises me. Even if you go for "Extra Large" at 80c/hour that would only account for $584/month. And it's much cheaper if you go for a reserved instance.
So you must be using $1000/month worth of bandwidth and storage: wow.
If you've done your sums right, though, I'd take it as a sign that you've got a fairly unique set of requirements, that are a bad fit for the Amazon billing model.
What happens when your Xeam server with 16GB of RAM develops a hardware fault, incidentally?
If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
Firstly, the provider that offers you "software as a service" has not told you that his SaaS offering isn't cloud hosted. That's an implementation detail.
The provider that offers you "cloud computing" has given you a bit of extra information, about the infrastructure they plan to use to offer you your service.
Your end users needn't know or care whether they're interacting with a physical server, a virtual server in a cloud, or a man in a box.
But being told it's a cloud implementation gives you clues that it'll be cheap, that it'll be fault-tolerant, that (assuming you program for it), adding or removing capacity will be instantly available.
If you base your business model on using the services of a bigger company to offer services to your customers, it is just a matter of time until that bigger company decides that they would rather get the money you are making than the money you are paying them.
There's quite a lot of precedent for smaller companies reselling services from larger companies.
IBM used to offer EDI interchange services. A lot of the sales were through industry specific resellers. So company X knows about, say, the insurance industry, and sells EDI services to insurers. Company X has its own helpdesk, and only refers the harder questions to IBM. IBM is very happy with this arrangement. The subs roll in month after month. IBM doesn't need to train anyone in the foibles of the insurance industry. Company Y, meanwhile, is reselling the same service to the automotive industry.
Then there's the thousands of gambling websites that are merely thin rebrandings of the same few underlying sites, which get referral fees. The larger company that writes the software and runs the service is effectively outsourcing consumer marketing, while also protecting themselves from risk.
what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
Probably very little. It will give you clues about what price/performance/reliability to expect.
If you were buying a business-critical web hosting service, you'd likely be asking the company questions about their setup. Do you have RAID? What's your disaster recovery procedure? How do you achieve high-availability on the database server? How long can you run on UPS? What's your SLA?
"Cloud" is a shorthand answer to many of these questions. The fine details are there for the reading, too.
Well, I was talking about generalities - what "cloud computing" means.
In the case of Amazon EC2, you get a virtual Linux server, on which you can run whatever services you like - VPN, SSH, WWW, whatever. It's simple, in so far as it gives you pretty much total flexibility.
I'm not sure about sending them DVD uploads. If they don't, a third party with lots of bandwidth could offer that service.
The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.
At first I thought you were contradicting me. But you're not, necessarily.
"Cake is just a buzz word. It makes non-bakers feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of ingredients and how they work together."
Combine eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar, flavourings, in just the right recipe, you get a cake. Combine datacenter technogolies, virtualisation, parallelisation, timesharing, web based management, in just the right recipe, and you get a cloud.
This doesn't mean that "cake" or "cloud" aren't useful shorthands.
If you're buying a physical server from your ISP, that's not a cloud. If you're buying a virtual server, is it hosted dynamically across hundreds or thousands of physical machines? If not, that's not a cloud.
Now, this probably doesn't matter to you. What you actually care about is price, performance, capacity, availability, resilience, flexibility etc.
Many believe that running a cloud is the easiest, cheapest way to sell fast, reliable hosting services, which can be commissioned and decommissioned in a very flexible manner. You can buy a VM from Amazon in seconds, and have it running instantly. You can close it down and stop paying just as fast.
One open question is, should the marketing use the buzzword? You don't actually care that it's in a cloud. You just care about its cost and features. But then again, being told it's in a cloud gives you clues about its features.
I'm getting increasingly fed up of every cloud story getting piles of comments deriding cloud as "just" something else.
- "The Cloud is just another name for datacenter" - "The Cloud is just another name for distributed computing" - "The Cloud is just another name for thin-client computing" - etc.
In this particular case, yes, the backend of the Amazon cloud is a bunch of datacentres. And you could build a virtual datacentre in the Amazon cloud.
But that doesn't mean that every datacentre is a cloud, because a cloud has properties that most datacentres do not.
I guess the warning bell is, if your business model is to host something simple and obvious on EC2, then resell it, you can expect direct competition - in this case from Amazon themselves.
To be sustainable, you need to add something difficult, or non-obvious, or that fills a niche, or stands out in some other way.
Cloud Avenue could still do OK, if they can make their offering better than Amazon's, by whatever means - a nicer UI, better management tools, better customer support, etc.
It's just not that high, you have to really stretch the numbers and miss some important factors in a biased manner to reach that conclusion, just as the article has.
Here's the problem with that: they've actually obtained some figures and done some maths, and come up with an interesting and unexpected conclusion.
You're contradicting them based entirely on figures plucked from the air, and gut feel.
Now, perhaps there is bias in their assumptions, but even if they're wrong by a factor of 4, then a dog uses as much resource as half a Land Cruiser.
ignoring the cost of manufacturing and replacement components as TFA did
The more detailed New Scientist coverage explicitly states that manufacturing is included. Replacement components is not mentioned - but to know for sure you'd have to look at the book itself.
Again, I have two dogs, I know what they consume including all the hidden costs and impact they have
There's a discrepancy somewhere that has to be explained. My guess is that you don't actually know the impact of meat production (even the low grade meat used for pet food). I'm a meat eater, and whenever I read about the resource that goes into meat, it shocks me. I have to work quite hard to ignore it!
To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.
They've chosen an inflammatory title, alright, but it seems the book's about a lot more than pets, and it doesn't look if they really advocate killing the family pooch for a meal.
It looks as if the whole book is about calculating the overall cost of various things in terms of resource usage using a standard unit of hectares/year. Supposedly there are interesting surprises in there. One review mentions that they say that a fully occupied plane is more efficient per passenger mile than cycling (taking into account the food to fuel the rider, and the hot shower to wash of their sweat).
It looks like they've misjudged their publicity drive though. The pet owners are clearly not impressed!
I think you missed the (somewhat facetious) point. The GP is pointing out that the "circle" of life is decays, so it's more like a spiral. Of course it is: otherwise it would be a perpetual motion machine.
New energy from the sun compensates for the decay, but the sun won't last forever (that's what the GP meant by "nuclear decay").
And he rightly points out that on human timescales, the cyclical elements dominate.
All you've done is the same as the GGP, which is to list some benefits of having a dog. The study tells you what the dog uses in terms of natural resources.
It's up to you decide how those costs and benefits balance.
Likewise, the study doesn't consider the benefits of car ownership. It's just out of scope.
The extra benefits you mention, are entirely relevant for someone who is blind, epileptic, depressive or unable to motivate themselves to exercise. But they're not all that relevant to anyone else.
I think the most relevant thing is that - like many people - dammit, you *love* your dogs. And that justifies the costs to you.
So really, when is some idiot going to suggest that people not have babies?
It's not an unusual view. The population timebomb has already gone off. We should definitely promote smaller families. Ideally as a matter of choice -- convince people to replace themselves as a maximum (i.e. 2 children or fewer per couple).
There are many obstacles to this: people do love to breed.
In fact the article doesn't discuss carbon. It measures energy use in terms of hectares/year. You can interpret that how you like. If you're concerned about CO2, you can probably translate it into CO2. If you're concerned about finite resources, you can think of that too.
If you're convinced that there's plenty to go around, move on, there's nothing to see here.
It may not the intended point of the article, but it's something entirely valid to take away from it:
- A pet consumes a lot of resources
- It's so high that it can be compared with a car
Whether the exact comparison is a large car, a small car, half a small car, it's still a lot of resource, especially when you think that most pet owners won't even have considered what their pet consumes.
This in a climate where people worry about a 60W lightbulb or a TV on standby.
It's because neither the Big Bang nor evolution suggest that anyone should dramatically change their lifestyle, or feel guilty about some aspect of their lifestyle.
Otherwise rational people love their carbon-positive lifestyles, so when someone says it's harmful they *really* want it to be untrue. Hence the conspiracy theories.
This pet issue really demonstrates that. However much people love owning cars (etc.), it can't compare to the love people develop for their pets. So anyone bearing news that pets use up resources (which shouldn't come as a surprise) is an enemy to be fought.
A much more honest approach, for those who want to continue their carbon-positive lifestyle, is to admit to not caring about the future climate of the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be beside your point, but it's my point precisely.
To paraphrase myself, replacing "datacentre" with your phrase "other people's servers":
"Other peoples servers" is not always a cloud, because a cloud has properties that "other people's servers" don't always have.
My web site runs on my ISP's server: OPS. But my ISP's hosting is not in a cloud.
Saying "Cloud is just a fancy way of saying OPS" is along the lines of saying "Oak is just a fancy way of saying tree".
If it's a personal DB, you'd probably not want to run it 24/7. Remember Amazon VMs are trivial to bring up and down, and you only pay while they're up.
If you're thinking about the backend for a personal Wordpress page (etc) this probably isn't the right platform.
I wonder if programming for cloud services will bring back the need for code that is optimized for speed (or using as little resources as possible), since you pay for the actual usage of these resources.
In server land, if you've got lots of clients, you were always paying for those resources. You max out a server, you have to buy another, or code something more efficient.
Usually, the cost of more computer resource is vastly lower than the cost of a programmer doing optimisation. Jeff Atwood has written frequently on the subject.
This surprises me. Even if you go for "Extra Large" at 80c/hour that would only account for $584/month. And it's much cheaper if you go for a reserved instance.
So you must be using $1000/month worth of bandwidth and storage: wow.
If you've done your sums right, though, I'd take it as a sign that you've got a fairly unique set of requirements, that are a bad fit for the Amazon billing model.
What happens when your Xeam server with 16GB of RAM develops a hardware fault, incidentally?
I'll try again then.
If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
Firstly, the provider that offers you "software as a service" has not told you that his SaaS offering isn't cloud hosted. That's an implementation detail.
The provider that offers you "cloud computing" has given you a bit of extra information, about the infrastructure they plan to use to offer you your service.
Your end users needn't know or care whether they're interacting with a physical server, a virtual server in a cloud, or a man in a box.
But being told it's a cloud implementation gives you clues that it'll be cheap, that it'll be fault-tolerant, that (assuming you program for it), adding or removing capacity will be instantly available.
Ah now, if all the good ideas in Risc OS were still used, we'd all be happier :)
If you base your business model on using the services of a bigger company to offer services to your customers, it is just a matter of time until that bigger company decides that they would rather get the money you are making than the money you are paying them.
There's quite a lot of precedent for smaller companies reselling services from larger companies.
IBM used to offer EDI interchange services. A lot of the sales were through industry specific resellers. So company X knows about, say, the insurance industry, and sells EDI services to insurers. Company X has its own helpdesk, and only refers the harder questions to IBM. IBM is very happy with this arrangement. The subs roll in month after month. IBM doesn't need to train anyone in the foibles of the insurance industry. Company Y, meanwhile, is reselling the same service to the automotive industry.
Then there's the thousands of gambling websites that are merely thin rebrandings of the same few underlying sites, which get referral fees. The larger company that writes the software and runs the service is effectively outsourcing consumer marketing, while also protecting themselves from risk.
what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
Probably very little. It will give you clues about what price/performance/reliability to expect.
If you were buying a business-critical web hosting service, you'd likely be asking the company questions about their setup. Do you have RAID? What's your disaster recovery procedure? How do you achieve high-availability on the database server? How long can you run on UPS? What's your SLA?
"Cloud" is a shorthand answer to many of these questions. The fine details are there for the reading, too.
And that's different from Software As A Service how?
The set "cloud computing" is a subset of "software as a service". HTH.
Well, I was talking about generalities - what "cloud computing" means.
In the case of Amazon EC2, you get a virtual Linux server, on which you can run whatever services you like - VPN, SSH, WWW, whatever. It's simple, in so far as it gives you pretty much total flexibility.
I'm not sure about sending them DVD uploads. If they don't, a third party with lots of bandwidth could offer that service.
The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.
At first I thought you were contradicting me. But you're not, necessarily.
"Cake is just a buzz word. It makes non-bakers feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of ingredients and how they work together."
Combine eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar, flavourings, in just the right recipe, you get a cake.
Combine datacenter technogolies, virtualisation, parallelisation, timesharing, web based management, in just the right recipe, and you get a cloud.
This doesn't mean that "cake" or "cloud" aren't useful shorthands.
If you're buying a physical server from your ISP, that's not a cloud. If you're buying a virtual server, is it hosted dynamically across hundreds or thousands of physical machines? If not, that's not a cloud.
Now, this probably doesn't matter to you. What you actually care about is price, performance, capacity, availability, resilience, flexibility etc.
Many believe that running a cloud is the easiest, cheapest way to sell fast, reliable hosting services, which can be commissioned and decommissioned in a very flexible manner. You can buy a VM from Amazon in seconds, and have it running instantly. You can close it down and stop paying just as fast.
One open question is, should the marketing use the buzzword? You don't actually care that it's in a cloud. You just care about its cost and features. But then again, being told it's in a cloud gives you clues about its features.
I'm getting increasingly fed up of every cloud story getting piles of comments deriding cloud as "just" something else.
- "The Cloud is just another name for datacenter"
- "The Cloud is just another name for distributed computing"
- "The Cloud is just another name for thin-client computing"
- etc.
In this particular case, yes, the backend of the Amazon cloud is a bunch of datacentres.
And you could build a virtual datacentre in the Amazon cloud.
But that doesn't mean that every datacentre is a cloud, because a cloud has properties that most datacentres do not.
I guess the warning bell is, if your business model is to host something simple and obvious on EC2, then resell it, you can expect direct competition - in this case from Amazon themselves.
To be sustainable, you need to add something difficult, or non-obvious, or that fills a niche, or stands out in some other way.
Cloud Avenue could still do OK, if they can make their offering better than Amazon's, by whatever means - a nicer UI, better management tools, better customer support, etc.
It's just not that high, you have to really stretch the numbers and miss some important factors in a biased manner to reach that conclusion, just as the article has.
Here's the problem with that: they've actually obtained some figures and done some maths, and come up with an interesting and unexpected conclusion.
You're contradicting them based entirely on figures plucked from the air, and gut feel.
The New Scientist write up gives more detail: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427311.600-how-green-is-your-pet.html?page=1
Now, perhaps there is bias in their assumptions, but even if they're wrong by a factor of 4, then a dog uses as much resource as half a Land Cruiser.
ignoring the cost of manufacturing and replacement components as TFA did
The more detailed New Scientist coverage explicitly states that manufacturing is included. Replacement components is not mentioned - but to know for sure you'd have to look at the book itself.
Again, I have two dogs, I know what they consume including all the hidden costs and impact they have
There's a discrepancy somewhere that has to be explained. My guess is that you don't actually know the impact of meat production (even the low grade meat used for pet food). I'm a meat eater, and whenever I read about the resource that goes into meat, it shocks me. I have to work quite hard to ignore it!
New Scientist's coverage goes into more detail:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427311.600-how-green-is-your-pet.html?page=1
To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.
Not that anyone will still be reading this discussion. Especially this far down the page...
But I actually looked up the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Eat-Dog-Sustainable-Living/dp/0500287902/
They've chosen an inflammatory title, alright, but it seems the book's about a lot more than pets, and it doesn't look if they really advocate killing the family pooch for a meal.
It looks as if the whole book is about calculating the overall cost of various things in terms of resource usage using a standard unit of hectares/year. Supposedly there are interesting surprises in there. One review mentions that they say that a fully occupied plane is more efficient per passenger mile than cycling (taking into account the food to fuel the rider, and the hot shower to wash of their sweat).
It looks like they've misjudged their publicity drive though. The pet owners are clearly not impressed!
I think you missed the (somewhat facetious) point. The GP is pointing out that the "circle" of life is decays, so it's more like a spiral. Of course it is: otherwise it would be a perpetual motion machine.
New energy from the sun compensates for the decay, but the sun won't last forever (that's what the GP meant by "nuclear decay").
And he rightly points out that on human timescales, the cyclical elements dominate.
All you've done is the same as the GGP, which is to list some benefits of having a dog. The study tells you what the dog uses in terms of natural resources.
It's up to you decide how those costs and benefits balance.
Likewise, the study doesn't consider the benefits of car ownership. It's just out of scope.
The extra benefits you mention, are entirely relevant for someone who is blind, epileptic, depressive or unable to motivate themselves to exercise. But they're not all that relevant to anyone else.
I think the most relevant thing is that - like many people - dammit, you *love* your dogs. And that justifies the costs to you.
So really, when is some idiot going to suggest that people not have babies?
It's not an unusual view. The population timebomb has already gone off. We should definitely promote smaller families. Ideally as a matter of choice -- convince people to replace themselves as a maximum (i.e. 2 children or fewer per couple).
There are many obstacles to this: people do love to breed.
If it helps, I'm on your side on this one.
MOD GRANDPARENT UP!
In fact the article doesn't discuss carbon. It measures energy use in terms of hectares/year. You can interpret that how you like. If you're concerned about CO2, you can probably translate it into CO2. If you're concerned about finite resources, you can think of that too.
If you're convinced that there's plenty to go around, move on, there's nothing to see here.
It may not the intended point of the article, but it's something entirely valid to take away from it:
- A pet consumes a lot of resources
- It's so high that it can be compared with a car
Whether the exact comparison is a large car, a small car, half a small car, it's still a lot of resource, especially when you think that most pet owners won't even have considered what their pet consumes.
This in a climate where people worry about a 60W lightbulb or a TV on standby.
But it was a very fun car to drive.
See, thinking of driving a car as "fun" is one of the things that bemuses me. But as I said, people's tastes vary.
You're exactly right.
It's because neither the Big Bang nor evolution suggest that anyone should dramatically change their lifestyle, or feel guilty about some aspect of their lifestyle.
Otherwise rational people love their carbon-positive lifestyles, so when someone says it's harmful they *really* want it to be untrue. Hence the conspiracy theories.
This pet issue really demonstrates that. However much people love owning cars (etc.), it can't compare to the love people develop for their pets. So anyone bearing news that pets use up resources (which shouldn't come as a surprise) is an enemy to be fought.
A much more honest approach, for those who want to continue their carbon-positive lifestyle, is to admit to not caring about the future climate of the earth.