Atom Powers <atom.pow...@gmail.com> writes: > One of the COs in my company keeps asking "why don't we put it all in > the cloud"? I'm running out of good answers.
Cost it out. Depending on how much dealing with hardware costs you, there are cases where the cloud can save you money; but usually, if you plan on leaving a server up for more than four months, it is cheaper to buy a server and co-locate it, before you count the inconvenience of dealing with physical hardware. The other misconception people have is that ec2 will eliminate your SysAdmin. It won't. It will reduce the load on the hardware guy, but you still need people who understand *NIX. > Question: > What are your experiences with cloud-based (or cloud-capable) content > management systems? > What options are there for putting a database-driven application in "the > cloud"? I know a lot of people who buy and co-locate beefy servers for database servers, who then go and use AWS or similar for web front ends. Most people I know doing databases in 'the cloud' use the "database 2.0" stuff. Couchdb and the like. NoSQL type stuff. I have a bunch of customers running databases on my VPS platform and I can tell you that sharing disk gives you suboptimal performance. the thing is, if you have two people splitting a SATA disk down the middle, sure, each guy gets half the space, but each person gets a whole lot less than half the performance. SATA disk is pretty good for sequential transfer, and operating systems go to great lengths to attempt to turn random writes into sequential writes. The problem is that if you've got two different virtuals each streaming sequential writes to the same disk, you get what is basically random access to those disks, as it's got to switch fairly quickly from writing one stream to writing the other. I am given to understand that Linode deals with this by keeping count of your IOPS, and if you trip a threshold, they warn you. If you trip the next threshold, they start actively limiting your disk I/O. This, I think, is a good idea, and something I will likely implement myself. but the point is that sharing spinning disk is not good for I/O performance. (now, how well does amazon EBS stack up to a database write load vs. local disk? I don't know. I'd be interested to hear, though. Amazon also offers SAS disks, I think, and sas performance degrades less when it becomes random (vs sata) but a shared sas disk is still never going to beat a unshared sas disk for performance.) Now, this isn't to say that the cloud is always a bad idea; if you have compute needs that vary by the hour, it's goddamn difficult to beat amazon.com. And if you need a dev box with 512MiB ram, there is no way you are going to be able to host even a free 1u for what it costs to get a VPS of that size. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
