Continuations: Cloud Principle #1: Post Machine Computing
Dave Stone
· 1 year ago
So, AWS SimpleDB is cloud, S3 is cloud.. but EC2 isn't?
albert
· 1 year ago
By my definition yes. And I am pretty sure that Amazon will soon have a true cloud offering for code execution also in addition to EC2, giving them a complete cloud stack.
Neil Capel
· 1 year ago
absolutely agreed, EC2 is awesome, but you are bringing up virtual instances that exist in Amazon's cloud infrastructure - but to the developer/software it's not cloud computing because you can outgrow that instance. Sure it's easy to deploy more but you still have to take that step. Companies like 10gen will scale for you, as they will take advantage of the cloud and give you the resources you need.
Of course their are a lot of advantages to EC2 in that you can configure as you like, however 10gen will be very fixed into what you can do. Although they will, I'm sure, try to provide everything a website should need.
dwight
· 1 year ago
Regarding being "fixed", I think there will be hybrids. Suppose you are using a 10gen-like solution somewhere. You can still use a traditional VM from someone when you want to do something "weird". Then, your 10gen/PaaS instance can talk to your VM for the special function via web services or the like.
Of course, this only makes sense if the VM-based stuff is rare: otherwise the whole point of platform as a service is lost. But if 95% of your site is on the platform and a few misc things off it, that should be ok, especially if most tricky things such as scalability have been handled for you. And for many sites *everything* they need can be done on the platform.
To give a concrete example, let's suppose you need to run Acrobat Distiller to generate PDFs, and your platform doesn't support that. You could run that on a separate server on the internet and farm those jobs out to it.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
albert
· 1 year ago
I will actually address that in my Cloud Principle #4 which deal with integration. I believe that for most of these things the solution will not be having to connect to your own VM somewhere, but connecting to someone's web service. The Acrobat Distiller example is perfect. Exactly the kind of thing someone should deliver in the cloud as a service.
All Comments
Of course their are a lot of advantages to EC2 in that you can configure as you like, however 10gen will be very fixed into what you can do. Although they will, I'm sure, try to provide everything a website should need.
Of course, this only makes sense if the VM-based stuff is rare: otherwise the whole point of platform as a service is lost. But if 95% of your site is on the platform and a few misc things off it, that should be ok, especially if most tricky things such as scalability have been handled for you. And for many sites *everything* they need can be done on the platform.
To give a concrete example, let's suppose you need to run Acrobat Distiller to generate PDFs, and your platform doesn't support that. You could run that on a separate server on the internet and farm those jobs out to it.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.