I'm not really familiar with SkyDrive and GoogleDrive - they're more targeted at consumers right? What about the corporate offerings? Can you just get more and more storage as required?
For Amazon EC2 - the scalability is in the number of machines you can buy, not in the configuration of each individual machine. Whilst there must be some finite limit to the total number of server instances that Amazon could provision at a given time, as far as an individual purchaser is concerned, there isn't "only 8 RU of rack space left, so you could put in 8 1U servers", or "we only have cooling for XYZ more watt/hours", or "we only have 10 more vCPUs we can commit'. Instead, the data centre doesn't have a defined limit as far as the customer is concerned, and you can buy 1, 5 or 10 more servers without the need to evaluate against typical DC constraints. Now, much spare capacity (cloud design patterns call for "reserve" fault domains - i.e. extra capacity to cater for growth) is a capacity management issue. It's always possible that someone turns up and says "I want to buy 1,000,000,000 server instances", but it's probably very unlikely. Based on what Amazon sees today, plus what they expect in the future, they pre-provision extra, spare, reserve capacity, so that customers can keep buying more capacity "on-demand" I think that's what's meant by "perception of infinite capacity". I think Tom Shinder's now working at MS as one of their cloud architects. If he's still on the list, he could chime in, as Microsoft's follows that design pattern. Cheers Ken From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 15 February 2013 12:24 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Backup to cloud? While I agree and support the NIST cloud definitions, I have to conclude that except for some private cloud configurations, no one is actually selling "Perception of infinite capacity," today -- and maybe not for a while, either. Amazon EC2 is definitely cloud computing, but there are limits on how much computing you can get without instantiating a new server instance. DropBox is cloud storage, but the limit of space is not that fluid -- same for SkyDrive, GoogleDrive, Box.com, etc. What the cloud provides today in reality, is self-service and major flexibility for expansion or reduction, as desired. The other definitions are legit, but there are no complete implementations of them out there today. ASB http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker<http://xeeme.com/AndrewBaker> Providing Virtual CIO Services (IT Operations & Information Security) for the SMB market... On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: No - I disagree. Whilst, in IT, there is much marketing BS from vendors wanting to sell you stuff, the core cloud definitions are pretty well settled IMHO. Most people use a variation of what NIST has published: Features: * Perception of infinite capacity, with rapid elasticity (as far as the user is concerned the capacity is available on-demand) * Ability for user to perform self-service provisioning/deprovisioning (no need to involve the vendor) * Broad network access: access via widely accepted protocols (like web services) thus accessible on a variety of devices and thick/thin client models * Resource Pooling: multiple end users may be mixed together and spread across the available physical resources and fault domains * Measured service: automated monitoring and capacity management (e.g. dynamic provisioning and resource usage levelling). Also provides transparent resource (and thus cost) accounting to the end user Types: * IAAS (you get some compute, storage etc.), * PAAS (you get a platform, like SQL Server) or * SAAS (you get to use an application e.g. like SalesForce) Location: * Private (your DC), * Public (someone else's DC) and * Hybrid (in your DC, but you can expand or burst into someone else's) Just uploading some data to a DC is definitely not cloud. Most outsourcers and vendors struggle with implementing all the features unless they are building from the ground up. To build a pure cloud (and I've worked on a couple of large private ones) involves a lot of work to build the systems that automate everything, because there's a lot of stuff (provisioning, incident management) that's usually made up "on the fly" in most places. And you can't automate rules that don't exist. Cheers Ken From: Webster [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Friday, 15 February 2013 4:41 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Backup to cloud? "The Cloud" is nothing more than someone else's data center. So yes, that is The Cloud. Thanks Webster From: Guyer, Don [mailto:[email protected]] Subject: RE: Backup to cloud? This is where the term "the cloud" becomes murky, in my opinion. If I'm sending data over a private circuit to a 3rd party data center, is that really "the cloud"? ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
