« IBM Web 2.0 - Part 1 | Home | Supercomputers are making a come-back … and man are they pissed! »
What is a Cloud
By John | February 13, 2008
Here is my definition of the Holy Grail “Cloud”.
Primary Characteristics
- It uses commodity-based hardware as its base. The hardware can be replaced anytime without affecting the cloud.
- It uses a commodity-based software container system. For example, a service should be able to be pulled from one cloud provider to any other cloud provider with no effect on the service.
Secondary Characteristics
- Virtualization engine
- Abstraction layer for the hardware, software, and configuration of systems
- Pay as you go with no lock-in
- Support
- Dynamic horizontal(global) and vertical(resources) scaling
- Autonomic computing (automated restarts, automated resource expansion and contraction).
- Flexible migration and restart capabilities
What are your thoughts ?
Topics: 3tera, amazon, blue cloud, cloud computing, ec2, grid, ibm, mosso, nick carr, rackspace, s3, the big switch, utility cloud computing, virtualization, yahoo |
February 13th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I thought a cloud was usually white and fluffy?
February 13th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Ops I forgot that one
February 13th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
this works for me. I had written about clouds etc from software vendor point of view a while ago, and this explanation works fine.
http://www.ifountain.com/blog/Are+the+software+vendors+better+off+supporting+the+virtual+machine+as+the+platform%3F
February 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Just what we are aiming to do — oh by the way — there is an SLA behind it too….
February 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
You can see the site here: http://www.gogrid.com
February 13th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
http://blog.gogrid.com/2008/02/05/understanding-grid-computing/
February 14th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Paul, It’s perplexing to me that there is no technical information on your site about your offering. The only explanation is about how to provision the servers.
Do I get to install whatever OS I want? any application I want? Do I get shell access?
What is your grid technology? How do you ensure that if a physical server goes down, it does not impact my virtual servers?
How do people decide whether or not to use the service is beyond me..
February 14th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Berkay,
We offer Cent OS, RHEL, and Windows right now and we’ll eventually offer completely pre-built “application stacks” with LAMP or LAMJ or whatever “application containter” you need… Use the UI to deploy and manage servers and the network from a high level — get root/admin access to the server once it is “deployed” from the UI. GoGrid has a management interface that our engineering staff uses to manage all nodes in the GRID. We can grow the size of the GRID by adding servers and storage — which is completely invisible to an end user of the service. All servers automatically failover to another node should there be any issue with a “server” in the GRID — GoGrid is built using XEN and Intel Quad Core servers.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 am
John,
This is a much more palatable definition than some others I have seen. If I stretch my definition of virtualization to include deployments to bare metal that require no action or knowledge by the application owner, then I can agree with all of it.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 am
By the way, I linked to you in my own cloud computing description today: http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/03/ah-yes-how-to-define-cloud-computing.html
March 4th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
[…] What is a Cloud […]
March 19th, 2008 at 9:45 am
With all the talk about “cloud computing” (my Google Alerts are absolutely buzzing on those keywords), I thought that I would take a step back and really think about the word cloud, merely as a thought provoking exercise. My post is here. Comments welcome.