George: Nice answer. Do you think cloud services is based on an oversubscription model? Where they hope those who purchase servers don't actually max them out memory/CPU wise?
Do you also believer that cloud services should never have any downtime? To me, cloud services is synonymous with redundancy.... > Subject: RE: Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch > Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:17:09 -0700 > From: gbon...@seven.com > To: brandon....@brandontek.com > CC: nanog@nanog.org > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Brandon Kim > > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 7:58 AM > > > > Cc: nanog@nanog.org > > Subject: RE: Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch > > > > > > Has our industry ever really fundamentally defined what is "cloud > > computing"????? > > > > Even though "MPLS" is sort of a buzzword too, we can define it, how it > > works, it's protocol and such... > > > > But cloud computing? > > My take on "cloud computing" is simply the provisioning servers or > virtual servers (say, VMWare or KVM) on the fly as needed. So you would > have a "pool" of servers. When load for one application rises, more > servers for that application are taken from the pool and added to the > mix as needed. > > When load drops, that instances are removed from the rotation handling > that application and returned to the pool of free (virtual) servers. > > Providers of network gear have been working on applications that monitor > the gear in the application delivery path (e.g. metrics on load > balancers) and automatically deploy instances as needed to handle that > application. This would be more of interest to providers of "bursty" > applications where they might have high load sometimes but a relatively > low "base" load. It could also be of interest to people who serve > customers in different time zones, such as the US and Europe where the > US application can be turned down at night and an application serving > Europe loaded up during their business day. > > It could also be of interest for someone who is expecting a temporary > "surge" of activity. It leads, though, to a completely different kind > of attack called the "denial of sustainability" attack where a > cloud-based provider is hit with a flood of "legitimate" transactions > causing the "cloud" management to kick in more servers to handle the > additional load. If that cloud is rented, a content provider could be > hit with a huge bill. >