Clouds are no substitute for competence
February 2nd, 2008 javier
This morning I came across an AP article on Yahoo news calling out Amazon’s ‘cloud computing’ initiatives. The all-too-clever title “Amazon’s Hot New Item: its data center” caught my attention and I wanted to see the folks at AP take a crack at the topic.
The article seemed innocent enough until I ran into this quote from the CEO of Dallas-based startup Mile Meter:
During the first dot-com boom, he said, “It was a badge of strength to have as much as possible in house. “Now, unless that is your core business…it’s a liability.”
Hmmm… I think the dot-com era statement was a bit over the top. Realistically, there was no real alternative to in-house infrastructure management. The hosting business was itself developing almost simultaneously and it was a dumb idea to simply hand over management of your entire setup to a 3rd party. Of course, you also needed tons of expensive gear to run stuff too. Well, it turns out today you still need tons of gear (assuming you’re successful anyway) and while it’s cheaper, the gear itself is only part of the problem.
But it’s the second part of the statement that I have deep issues with (and I am perfectly open to the possibility of it being taken out of context). The idea that you have to be in the business of managing technology assets in order to justify not going the EC2/S3 route (and it must be stated that EC2, while tres-cool is still in beta) seems short sighted. In fact, it counters completely the idea that operational excellence delivered through a talented ops team and a good infrastructure is a competitive advantage. It certainly is for the big, established players in the business — including Amazon.com. Tim O’Reilly wrote about this a while back when discussing how operations is the new “Secret Sauce” of companies doing business over the web.
Of course, perhaps part of the value of the S3/EC2 offering is that you tap into Amazon’s ops excellence. From what I have seen from playing with it, all you get is virtualized storage and virtual machines which have some lifecycle tooling around them. In effect, hosted gear. No monitoring, no application management, no person to call to debug why your memcache setup isn’t performing, and perhaps most important… no SLA (not for EC2 yet, anyway).
EC2/S3 save you hardware and storage costs. Everything else regarding operations skill, capacity planning, scalability knowledge, and good setup techniques still hold true for any business which derives its revenue from the web.
Entry Filed under: IT Industry, Javiers Blog
5 Comments Add your own
1. Tony Lucas | February 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I couldn’t agree more, although Amazon EC2 is a massive jump forward in the ability to have power on demand, it is also a jump backwards for people wanting to use it for hosting web applications at the same time.
It solves some problems (e.g capacity management to a degree), but creates other problems:
No permanent ‘live’ storage (S3 is near live, but not good enough if you want to run databases on it without workarounds).
No instance continuity (if a physical machine dies, not only does your instance automatically die, and you lose the data that was on it at the time unless you’ve backed it up, but it won’t restart either).
No static ip addreses. (if your instance does die, either through you shutting it down or through a failure, there is a reasonable likelyhood you will lose the ip address you are using, and thus have to use a dynamic dns service to *try* and keep settings up to date).
No integrated services like load balancing, capacity management, etc etc etc.
Ok, I’m extremely biased (I work for FlexiScale the competitor to Amazon EC2), and we haven’t got all the things listed above working yet either, but we’re a lot further down the list than Amazon.
Heres to the next 18 months as the entire industry evolves!
Tony Lucas
2. Sunil | May 15th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Startups with products aimed at large scale adoption in a SaaS mode cannot afford to miss out leveraging cloud computing. All the points raised about no permanent storage, static IPs,SLAs etc hold good. Amazon is fixing these as we go along. As a startup do I wait till all these are done and dusted? I may not be able to afford to. Does it bring on more to my plate to manage? yes, certainly but with the right amount of automation and support persons in house it is definitely worth it. We are using this infrastructure in production mode from Jan 08 and yet to witness an instance loss or data loss. Touchwood.
3. Sunil | May 15th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Oops, forgot to include a link. If you need more details about how we leveraged cloud computing in our product please check out http://sunilabinash.vox.com
4. Blogging Hyperic » &hellip | June 10th, 2008 at 8:08 am
[...] operations and that they truly do have incredible infrastructure. That said, it’s yet another wake-up call to those who think that simply offloading their computing to the cloud (whether Amazon’s or [...]
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