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A good week for cloud computing

Amazon offers 99.95% SLA

Amazon announced today that it was exiting beta and offering a 99.95% SLA within a region. Hopefully this is going to put some cloud naysayers to rest, at least on the reliability front. Amazon is offering accountability in the form of service credits if it violates the SLA. Now this may not be enough for some of you with mission critical applications, but my guess is that most people out there are going to be just fine with it, considering the cost savings that on demand cloud infrastructure provides. Oh yeah, they’re going to be offering Windows servers too. This should make some dot-net-heads pretty happy.

There are already hundreds (thousands?) of companies taking advantage of Amazon EC2 computing resources, and those that aren’t are going to catch up real quick, especially as they realize how much money they are wasting on static server resources that are mostly sitting around idling. You just can’t afford that, not in this economy. Companies are going to wise up and start cutting costs on non critical infrastructure and pushing it into the cloud. And as they gain trust for the cloud, pieces of critical infrastructure are going to follow.

Rackspace building weapons of mass destruction

Rackspace just acquired Slicehost and JungleDisk in what appears to be an effort to shore up its arms race against Amazon. They are still pretty far behind true cloud infrastructure (by this I mean on-demand api-driven resource allocation) but maybe Slicehost can make this happen for them. I’ve been a loyal Slicehost customer for close to two years now, and they’ve declined to accept uploaded virtual images thus far, but maybe that will change. See below for why Slicehost isn’t really a cloud, yet.

Your VPS ain’t a Cloud

Many ‘cloud’ vendors are still just rebranded VPSs. We’ve had virtualized infrastructure in hosting companies for years. What makes a true cloud like Amazon EC2 is that it only takes a credit card and a minute to get computing resources. The other key is that manual tweaking and hand provisioning are going the way of the dinosaur. You need to be able to get a new server up and running with your latest environment and software in minutes, not hours, days, or weeks.

Hosting solutions that require you to first acquire resources by booting up an image and then installing your software are going to be left in the dust. Amazon lets you upload a virtual image you create, which means you can mange your own image catalog, and if you’re using something like Elastic Server then you can dynamically provision your servers from recipe templates that ensure the quick reproducibility of your stack to any virtual format, whether it’s in your datacenter, or up in the cloud.

In 2009 we’re going to start to see companies moving to virtual and cloud infrastructure and dynamic provisioning to cut costs and gain agility. It’s going to be an interesting year.

I’m a little anxious about the Slicehost acquisition, but I’ve been a customer of both Slicehost and Rackspace for a long time now, so I’m hopeful that it’ll be beneficial for us all in the long run.

I’ve been thinking about Slichost for a while now, and how the entire concept of a “slice” is likely to be deprecated in short order. Whenever I need to buy and extra slice I think about how silly it is that I should have to be worried about that sort of thing.

I read your definition at “21 Experts Define Cloud Computing” and thought that yours was the best, most others missed key elements. I guess it confirms the magnitude of the opportunity when the experts are so lame - it means its early and the road is wide open.
Walter Adamson
Melbourne, Australia

Walter, thank you. I’ve made the point in other posts that many people are confusing cloud with SaaS, because they have recently gotten exposure to SaaS through things like Google apps and salesforce.com while the truth is these things have been around for a number of years and we already have a name for them (SaaS), and that cloud is really a revolution in resource acquisition and provisioning, not the same thing as SaaS.