I'm on a new mail client and accidentally responded to just Derek. On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 02:00:58PM -0400, Derek J. Balling wrote: > > On Jun 7, 2011, at 8:40 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > > On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 07:25:23AM -0400, Evan Pettrey wrote: > >> Greetings, > >> > >> I've been asked to put together a presentation on the pros and cons of > >> cloud > >> computing and a recommendation for what, if anything, can be moved to the > >> cloud which will result in a net savings that will be worth any additional > >> problems/headaches. > > > > I think the whole conversation is easier if you don't say "cloud" - instead, > > say "outsourcing" -
> Maybe. Maybe not. You could just as easily be running in a private cloud, > inside your own facility, on your own hardware, where you virtualize your > entire infrastructure for maximum versatility. Heard from a lot of people at > the HP Discover conference this past week doing just that, and it's just as > valid a definition of "cloud computing" as any other (moreso than many > actually). while a good pxe setup is great, and really, the only reasonable way to manage a fleet once it gets beyond a certain size, I think it's silly to call it "the cloud" because that sort of thing has been the way it's done at larger places for most of my career. (granted, 10 years ago when I tried it for the first time, it still required flashing firmware sometimes to make pxe work, but my point is that the technology has been here for a long time.) If marketing wants to call it something else, that's fine, but for the sake of our own sanity, we should call it 'automatic provisioning' or 'pxe provisioning' or 'kickstart' or something a little more descriptive that doesn't confuse the issue with virtualization. So yeah, instead of 'internal cloud' I say "automatic provisioning system" mean, it's a good thing to have, essential once your system gets beyond a certain size, but saying that this has anything to do with the decision to virtualize, I think, is a mistake. If you do virtualize, you should put effort into making the virtuals provisionable through the same system as physical servers. Heck, cobbler does this out of box. With both xen and VMware, I know you can use pxe to deliver guest kernels, too. I think one great disservice all this 'cloud' talk does is relating auto-provisioning to virtualization. Both technologies are great when you need them, but you can have auto-provisioning without virtualization and vis-a-vis. Personally, I think that automatic provisioning is useful in more situations than virtualization is, but really you should look at both technologies on their own; You are doing yourself a disservice if you virtualize because you want automatic provisioning capabilities. I think keeping some control over the jargon used in our work is important; It's hard to do our jobs if we have to use marketing terms that have no (or a large number) of operational meanings; this is why I try to break it down in to real terms that have real meaning. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
