I've been following cloud computing since it was simply called virtualization/distributed and there was a wonderful tool with linux, to manage and expose physical hardware as a whole, where you could deploy then VM's inside. OpenMosix, was his name, now dead. Saw Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, UML, qemu and OpenVz all flourishing. Hell, I even got into LPAR while working for the - one and only - portuguese public bank, in Linux on Mainframe.
Now, with the 2.0 advent and service-this, service-that, there's a lot of companies going into the "cloud"... To sysadmins this is just another way of doing stuff. We're giving up on physical hardware management and entering the virtual world, leaving the physical world to our hardware supplier. It seems naturally. Yet, these cloud computing servers still need sysadmin work - will talk about it in another post. I'm personally fan of AWS - Amazon Web Services -, since it has all the tools and solutions that every service needs, when you thing on scalability, availability and pay-as-you-go. But there are more for storage, database, content delivery, etc, you name it. AWS is the only one that has the flexibility for people to upload their own machine that they build. For sysadmin perspective this is rather important, since there's some tools to help us manage "intra-cloud" (cloud computing in-house, local) or "inter-cloud" (internet/public cloud computing). You can read further details on my codebits talk: http://www.vitordomingos.com/talks/codebits_20081112.pdf Still, Cloud Computing is a new great tool for sysadmins, but its the holly grail for developers. On a private cloud computing mailing list someone asked why do we need cloud to scale from 1 or 2 machines to 10, 20 or 100, on demand, automatically or just with a few clicks. Well, the answer lies with the development team and with regular service scale. This last one is rather obvious, the service needs to scale horizontally, vertically or both, when we reach peeks. But, the first one is using cloud computing scalability to hide bad software development. Heck! If software doesn't scale by itself, let's just throw it some hardware to solve the problem - it's cheap, pay-as-we-go and on-demand. This is why cloud computing is a stick of two nozzles. It's being used to address development screwups rather than ease sysadmin job. One of Guy Kawasaki's startup rules is "don't worry, be crappy". I'll just complete it: "don't worry, be crappy, there's cloud computing". //your beloved BOFH //VD _______________________________________________ tce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.paradigma.pt/mailman/listinfo/tce
