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Jul

2

In The Cloud

Filed Under technology |

Lately, I’ve been doing a bunch of research around cloud computing, for no other reason other than I find it genuinely interesting. At my company, we’ve invested some money in dedicated servers for our staging and production application environments, and cloud computing offers a lot more flexibility, for a lot less, it seems on the surface.

The general equation is, cost per instance/hour. Which means 2 servers, at $0.10 an hour, is a grand total of $0.20! That’s not bad, but keep in mind, application servers run 24/7, so imagine the equation being more like 0.10*(2*72), that’s more like it. Bandwidth cost is also extremely low, its about on par with what we pay now, but also, its on a “pay as you need” basis, so we actually save costs if we are using them less, much more granular.

But what can you do with the cloud? Well, that was my initial question, what are the constraints? Basically, there are none. I have been doing most of my experimentation on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Once you’ve got an account setup, you simply choose from their library of Amazon Machine Images (or AMIs), and define an instance for yourself of that AMI, as simple as a shell command! Seconds later, you’ve got a Debian, or CentOS, or even Windows server ready to take orders! Wow! Accounts come with nice features such as elastic VLANs, allowing account-level firewall protection, as well as elastic IPs which you can use to do some very interesting load balancing techniques, all of this power available to you for very little upfront cost. Its literally as simple as I’ve explained it, I was amazed at how quickly I was commandeering multiple debian instances in my account!

So whats the catch, there is always one, right? Indeed there is. If you shutdown or “terminate” an instance of an EC2 cloud, you will actually lose all applications and data. Most people would say, well come on, thats crap! How do you expect me to run a server on that!? Well, to that I say, how often have you completely powered down a remote server without having it reboot? The saving grace here is that reboots actually retain the application and data, you only lose it if you’ve terminated the box. So, to me, that seems like a pretty good deal, especially since Amazon makes it so easy for you to build private AMIs, why not just image your perfect system, back up your data on your (included) S3 share, and just bring it back up in minutes if you need to?

Seems like a winner to me.

This is definitely an interesting paradigm shift from hosting as I know it, I am definitely still in the sandbox phase with this stuff, but its definitely an interesting concept, who knows where it could take me and my company. If we decided cloud computing was the way for our staging environment, we’d see a saving of close to $1500 a year for just that server, thats some serious savings in my mind! Or what if we built our fully optimized server instance, made a private AMI of it, and were suddenly able to roll out 20 application servers in literally 10 minutes? That is truly amazing to me. Looking forward to seeing where this kind of technology goes.


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