Cloud Computing Info

I am a huge fan of Amazon EC2. It’s simple to use and very cheap. You can pick an existing machine image, fire it up and be on your way. If you add up the amount though, the cheapest machine image will cost you about $80 per month. How would you like to get something comparable (a developer style machine) for $20 per month?

Add in Rails, PHP, Java and even host based javascript support with SSH and SFTP access, root access and one button application deployment? All of this for about $0.65 per day? Yes, it’s true.

I just got an email that I am sad to see.

Dear On-Demand Enterprise Readers:

Effective Dec. 19, 2008, we will be suspending publication of On-Demand Enterprise (formerly GRIDtoday). We appreciate your consistent feedback to us over the years and would like to thank you for your loyal readership.

Best wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy holiday season and for a successful 2009.

Sincerely,

Diane Lieberman
SVP/Publisher
diane@taborcommunications.com

The GridToday website itself doesn’t mention anything about shutting down.

InformationWeek has a good article, Behind The Storage Cloud. This article gives something of the plumbing behind the available storage in the cloud. Something they didn’t talk about in that article are the limitations I have been running into using the cloud.

For infrastructure providers like Google or Force.com, who are offering a PaaS (Platform as a Service), the storage is built into the application. If you chose them to develop your application, that works out fine. However, if you are looking for archiving or storage scaling (grow storage as you need it), it’s not so good.

Amazon offers a different kind of storage.