I was talking to Steve Riley last week (he's working foe Amazon these days) and he quoted me 12 cents an hour for a basic server on Amazon Web Services - around $1000 a year. He also wasn't saying much about S3 indicating AWS was the direction they were heading for the long haul. Pretty secure setup (not that I'm able to use them at this time) and well thought out. 1K a year is pretty cheap for Windows server.......
John W. Cook Systems Administrator Partnership For Strong Families 315 SE 2nd Ave Gainesville, Fl 32601 Office (352) 393-2741 x320 Cell (352) 215-6944 Fax (352) 393-2746 MCSE, MCTS, MCP+I, A+, N+, VSP4, VTSP4 From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:58 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Cloud computing... your opinions We looked at S3 pricing for a small startup I'm involved with, and it actually seemed rather expensive compared to some competing models. Admittedly we were looking at storing long-form video, so perhaps our requirements were the more significant problem. So are you using CloudFront as an object store for... web apps? End user access stuff? -sc From: Adam Meixler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:41 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Cloud computing... your opinions Yup. We love S3 and CloudFront. Though we admittedly don't have numbers to prove CloudFront's effectiveness S3 is brilliant for simple and cheap on line storage of assets, like jpgs or pdfs, for a website. From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:31 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Cloud computing... your opinions Very cool. Are you using S3 too? -sc From: Adam Meixler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:27 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Cloud computing... your opinions There of course business concerns with cloud computing such as reliability, security, and cost however after having spent significant time with EC2 and goGrid over the last 6 months there are also very many drawbacks to each way of implementing a cloud. Examples such as, EC2 instances always have dynamic IPs. This is fine most of the time but when one of your AD's DNS instances restarts and is assigned a new private IP address you do have a bit of work on your hands (I have hopes of working around this with VPC but haven't found the time). GoGrid doesn't have a perimeter firewall and instead depends upon the windows firewall to secure each instance. You can create a centOS gateway to act as your firewall but are now adding more complexity. Also, if you do find yourself in EC2 plan your security groups well! Membership can't be changed once an instance is started, though an instance may belong to any number of groups You will find other limitations as you deploy into the cloud, most of which can be gotten around with a little extra elbow grease and scripting. We currently are going hybrid with a private cloud as the central site and cloud sites in supporting rules tied together through CentOS openVPN instances. Is it pretty? No. Is it cheaper than multiple DR sites? Absolutely! From: Alex Eckelberry [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:05 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Cloud computing... your opinions We're working on cloud computing initiatives (like everyone), and I'm also doing a fair amount of research into the area. (Of course, the whole idea of "cloud computing" is itself fairly silly, when it's just a renaming of the concept of a network-connected computer. But whatever, it's the hot topic.) There are areas where it makes sense, such as email filtering. Web filtering, well maybe not so much. CRM (like SalesForce.com), makes sense. I'm curious -- what are your thoughts on cloud computing? What might be the security questions you would ask your cloud computing vendors? What irks you about it? What is good about it? Alex Alex Eckelberry, CEO Sunbelt Software 33 N. 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