East Coast StartupA Cloud Jumpstart
These days, everyone is talking about Cloud Computing. For many software companies, it’s a crucial way of cutting costs and increasing flexibility. Cloud computing gives software development companies several key advantages over traditional platforms such as co-located or dedicated hosting. There are many options for Cloud hosting, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. We’ve been looking at these options for the last couple weeks, so this is a collection of some of the things we’ve learned along the way.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
This is one of the older players in the cloud market. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, so it has a ton of great features. Amazon has a number of features including EBS (Elastic Block Store), S3 (Simple Storage Service), CloudFront, Simple Queue Service, RDS (Relational Database Service), and a handful of others including payment processing services.
EC2 also has a neat feature that allows you to pack a virtual hard disk image into what’s known as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). AMIs can be easily deployed, shared and stored.
Amazon is limited in a couple ways as well. Primarily, it doesn’t have the ability to create cloud servers with Windows Server 2008, so if you use Windows, you should get used to using Windows Server 2003. Also, the performance of Amazon is the worst of its competitors, and its geographic dispersion is limited to the server farms already owned by Amazon. In short, Amazon’s system is fully featured, but ultimately was not built to be a cloud hosting platform.
We use EC2 at EvoApp, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be giving more information about the development of Amazon’s cloud platform, including information about some of the cool things you can do with it.
GoGrid
GoGrid is a neat cloud hosting platform that allows you to launch virtual instances of servers and control them as if they were virtual servers. GoGrid is neat for a couple reasons. GoGrid allows you to use Windows Server 2008; it allows you to launch cloud instances dedicated entirely to database hosting, and it also allows you to launch a dedicated F5 load balancer on the fly and configure it earlier.
In our experience, GoGrid has the best performance specs of all the platforms, but it is also limited in a few ways. First of all, GoGrid often doesn’t have great uptime, which is a big problem for web based software providers. It works great for services that only require intermittent service, however. GoGrid also does not have a great file storage mechanism, but it does have a cloud storage system that gives you up to 10 GB of storage.
The Rackspace Cloud (Formerly Mosso)
The Rackspace Cloud (formerly known as Mosso) is primarily comprised of 3 branches: Cloud Servers, Cloud Sites, and Cloud Files.
Cloud Servers is similar to EC2 but with slightly better bandwidth and a price point that starts around $0.015 / hour or $11 / month per instance. Another primary difference is that unlike Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers are persistent. This means that when the server is shut down or there is a failure on the server side, no data is lost. Windows servers are not currently available (though there is a beta version available) which is a downside if rely on .NET.
Cloud Sites is a great option for web developers and designers. It has some neat features that can make life easier, such as the ability to automatically invoice your customers for sites you may host on their behalf on your cloud platform. The starting price is $100 a month, but for that you get an unlimited number of virtual servers, only a limited amount of compute capacity. If you ask their sales reps (via live chat), you can get reduced volumes if you don’t plan to use the full capacity, down to $25/mo.
Cloud Files is similar to Amazon’s S3 platform, and allows easy distribution of files. The upside here is that it is powered by Limelight Networks, which has a much faster, lower latency CDN than Amazon’s proprietary network. This gives you increased performance for delivering large files such as streaming video, etc.
In Summary…
We like Amazon and have had few problems so far. If you are a less tech savvy person, or rely on Window Server 2008, I would recommend using GoGrid. GoGrid makes cloud computing easier than walking. If you are a little more tech savvy or have special use cases, Amazon is probably the most flexible solution, giving open APIs to access almost all their functionality. We’ll probably be updating you more on some of the Amazon service offerings over the next couple months. Rackspace Cloud seems like a neat offering, and if anyone out there is a little more familiar with it or has tried out the beta version of Windows Cloud Servers, we’d love to hear your feedback on that.
Links
For convenience, here are links to all three of these products:
The Rackspace Cloud for Windows (Beta)
Check out a Live Cloud Based Platform
If you’re interested, check out the EvoApp platform, live at http://www.evoapp.com
We’re working on putting together a full demo platform, but we’d love to get your feedback. If you’re interested, please email support(at)evoapp.com!
Until next time, happy clouding!
- Joe
Your site is excellent. I m gonna bookmark, ty for info. Continue doing on it.
Good Site on Cloud Computing and SaaS – We are periodically looking for good blog information
related to Rackspace Cloud. Also we are looking for contributors to add value to our blog.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks