On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Digy <[email protected]> wrote: > > Most probably, I don't understand the problem. > Lucene is intented to be a *fast* search engine on *huge* data and people > are trying to increase the performance using every tricks that exist. If I > don't have enough NW bandwidht comparable to local disk access why should I > use AzureDirectory (or any Webdav-server or iSCSI). > This structure also includes sharing (possible)sensitive data with MS. > Just to avoid backups? >
The idea with the cloud services (all of them, being general here) is to visualize the idea of a server, and then configure the network to meet demand, dynamically. The common example is a sport website - when the sport is in season web traffic is high, but off season it's very low. Traditional hosting has you allocate resources based on peak. With cloud hosting, you can run 50 servers to meet load in the peak season, then drop down to 10 servers off season which also includes saving the cost of those 40 servers. Another advantage is to push your site closer to the user. If you have a large user base in the west US and in New Dehli, you could have a server instanced in California and one in India so users have a much shorter route to reach your site. Cloud providers have crazy levels of hardware and bandwidth between the nodes, there really isn't much issue with performance network or IO. The downside to this is the apps must be written in a way that handles the fact they will have no idea where the data really is stored, or even where the CPU sits. How this is handled varies among cloud providers, and even within a provider. It's not a solution for every, even most sites, but when you do need this it's a pretty good thing. > PS: I would surely give it a try if I could set up a "Azure Blob Storage - > server" on my fast local network. > > DIGY I believe if you download the Azure SDK there is a "local mode" and I believe Microsoft has a beta of running your own "azure" on server 2008 - this may not be out yet, but I know it's been discussed. I think all of the cloud guys (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) have ways to get a trial for free now - this stuff is constantly changing and to be honest understanding the pricing plans requires a knowledge of mathematics and accounting I seem to lack. -- Michael C. Neel (@ViNull) http://www.ViNull.com
