On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 04:13:47PM -0200, Friedrich Locke wrote: > Hi folks, > > i have seen, some minutes ago, a message about cloud with BSD! > I have seen announcements on cloud computing every where. What is the > difference between a BSD cloud and a linux cloud ? A windows cloud and a > linux cloud ? > Isn't all that the new buzz word in the market ? > > So what would a BSD cloud be different in the context of cloud (not openbsd > features) ?
The "cloud computing" of Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid, etc merely describes a VPS farm where images can be installed, managed, and migrated from a web service the vendor provides. Fundamentally, nothing exotic of the OS is required beyond the typical Xen/VMWare/KVM support and related disk and network drivers. Also, the vendors may install packages which communicate with their "cloud" controller, and in those cases it's rare that non-Linux systems will be supported. It really depends on the services provided by the vendor's web application, and the storage infrastructure (i.e. the possibly specialized disk drivers). > So in essence what is it really cloud we have not doing since networks > have been in the game ? Don't take this as an offense, i just cannot > understand all this frenesy about clouds ... It's just a marketing term. Also, cloud vendors very intentionally hide the ball from people. Why? "Cloud compute time" is typically measued in hours that your VM is provisioned in the farm--i.e. the image running inside a VM instance, whether or not your image is halted. If you price out one month of "cloud compute time" (i.e. 24 hours * 30 days) and factor in your bandwidth usage, for moderate and heavy utilization a co-located or leased server will be cheaper, often times significantly. For low-end usage a dedicated VPS instance will be comparable or cheaper. Vendors don't want people comparing prices between "cloud computing" and regular leasing or VPS hosting. "Cloud computing" really only makes sense 1) for very low utilization; 2) for very high utilization, where you need to provision many images dynamically throughout the day, week, or month; 3) when you value the redundancy and failsafe provided by being able to snapshot and migrate instances in "the cloud"--i.e. across the vendor's VPS farm. I co-locate my own servers, and maintain some cloud images on Rackspace as a failsafe. I'm only charged a nominal fee for storage of the images, until I provision a server instance from one of the backup images, which ideally should happen rarely, and only for short periods of time.
