Jonathan Aquilina wrote: > I am venturing back to the cloud side again isn't cloud just a fancy name > for virtualized servers?
For vendors getting their margins and products destroyed by AWS and other public/open infrastructure clouds like rackspace/openstack/etc. etc. your statement is often quite true. When you run across someone trying to sell you a "cloud" and dig a bit deeper they rarely have anything to show beyond virtual servers and block storage. A few might have an object store to offer as well but that is about it. It's sad and pathetic but you see it every day. The difference on real IaaS clouds like Amazon is incredibly stark when compared to the pretenders and marketers. I think AWS has more than 30+ separate products all orchestrated by API calls and the web management interface. It is the real deal. The capability gains are impressive enough that we see people moving away from pure focus on cost -- it's now possible to do stuff easily on AWS that would be pretty darn hard to orchestrate/manage/deploy internally given how many useful things Amazon has grafted an API onto. AWS used to have a nice comprehensive overview page but I can't find it anymore so I'll just dump a few ... EC2 - virtual servers on demand, via auction market or purchased up front in various sizes, configs and global locations S3 - globe spanning object store holding trillions of objects EBS - region spanning block storage VPC - software or hardware defined VPNs that are incredibly powerful and customizable Glacier - long term cold storage service Redshift - data warehouse & analytics EMR - hadoop as a service RDS - managed MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle, no DBA required SimpleDB - light no-SQL datastore DynamoDB - fast noSQL datastore SQS - message passing SNS - message passing SES - email service SWS - workflow tools CloudFormation - orchestration and "stack" management Import/Export - terabyte scale data ingest and export via shipped drives and arrays DirectConnect - peer directly with Amazon .. and that is only a small and non-representative list of what they have running, in production, today. On a feature by feature comparison many other cloud vendors look like pathetic pretenders. At most they can offer compute and block storage. Nobody else can come close to the array that the bigger public IaaS clouds are starting to push out. Not trying to be an Amazon shill here - it's just a personal pet peeve of mine due to many years of seeing vendors BS to me about their "magic cloud" that turns out to be nothing more than a hypervisor and some trivial orchestration tricks. IaaS clouds make them look like jokes. -Chris _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
