Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid

Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print; beneath the heady metaphor lurk familiar pitfalls, complex pricing, and many questions

 

GoGrid
GoGrid refers to itself as the "world's first multi-server control panel." GoGrid's offerings aren't functionally different from Amazon's EC2, but using the old term "control panel" seems to be a better description of what's going on than the trendier term "cloud." You start up and shut down load balancers in much the same way as relatively ancient tools like Plesk and cPanel let you add and subtract services.

While GoGrid offers many of the same services as Amazon's EC2, the Web-based control panel is much easier to use than the EC2 command line. You point and click. There's no need to cut and paste information because little pop-up boxes show the way, by suggesting available IP addresses, for example. The system is intuitive, and it takes only a few minutes to build up your network. A simple ledger on the left keeps track of the costs and helps you manage the budget.

GoGrid also has a wider variety of OS images ready to go. There is the usual collection of CentOS/Fedora and common LAMP stacks. If you need Windows, you can have Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0, and Microsoft SQL Server is available at extra cost. There are also images with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and the Facebook application server. These make it a bit easier to start up.

While GoGrid offers many of the same features as Amazon's EC2, it doesn't provide more cloudlike services for storing information in a shared way like SimpleDB. This can make it a bit harder to start up and shut down servers without a bit of grief. The startup notes for the service point out that the only way to stop paying for a server is to delete it, and that means losing all of the data on it.

There's no simple way to build custom images at this moment, but the documentation says GoGrid is working on a way to turn any running server into an image that can be restarted later. If you're going to be expanding and contracting your network as the traffic ebbs and flows, you'll have to come up with some tools of your own to add and subtract these servers. [ See the QuickTime video. ]

The Bottom Line

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon, amazon.com/ec2

Preview

Cost: 10 cents per hour for a "small instance" (1.7GB of memory, 160GB of instance storage), 15 cents per gigabyte of data storage per month, 10 to 17 cents per gigabyte of data transferred Platforms: Linux-based systems Bottom Line: Amazon EC2 offers a great collection of tools and experimental offerings that is rapidly expanding. Already offering the broadest set of cloud services by far, Amazon supports a wide range of application platforms including JBoss, and active development shows the cloud changing day by day. Cons include endless cutting and pasting for the command-line interface, and the shared storage (S3) is relatively expensive for low-grade data such as log files.

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The Bottom Line

Google App Engine Google, google.com/appengine/

Preview

Cost: About 5 million free page views. After that, 10 to 12 cents per hour of a CPU core, 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, and 9 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred. Platforms: Any Python 2.5 Web application that operates in a sandbox that excludes actions such as writing to the file system. Bottom Line: App Engine makes life easy for programmers who code simple database front ends in Python, though the API is deliberately limited. There are no background threads, files, or other crutches. It's all database, all the time, but only a simplified database at that. The pricing model -- based on squirrelly metrics such as CPU megacycles -- may make costs difficult to anticipate. An application dashboard offers clean views of performance.

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The Bottom Line

GoGrid GoGrid, gogrid.com

Preview

Cost: 12 cents per hour of a CPU core. Load balancing, DNS, 500GB of storage, and incoming data transfers are free. Outbound data transfers cost 25 cents per gigabyte Platforms: CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Apache, PHP, MySQL, or Facebook; Windows Server 2003 with IIS, ASP.Net, SQL Server 2005 Bottom Line: GoGrid offers the widest range of machine images, including Windows systems. A clean, AJAX-based control panel makes it simple to get a sophisticated network up quickly and efficiently, and saves you the trouble of cutting and pasting IP addresses and other details. GoGrid doesn't offer many cloudlike features for database storage; you have to mirror the databases yourself. The company is still working on a way to freeze a machine instance so that you don't have to pay for it when it's not running.

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The Bottom Line

AppNexus AppNexus, appnexus.com

Preview

Cost: 22 cents per hour for a 2.83GHz server. High throughput NAS costs 50 cents per gigabyte per month, while archival storage costs significantly lower. Platforms: Linux-based systems Bottom Line: AppNexus is a way to share the cost of owning top-of-the-line enterprise tools. It makes load balancers and file storage systems available on a fractional basis, and it provides a content delivery network that spreads your static files throughout the Web. Cloudlike features are implemented with old-school metaphors like "shared file systems," which may be a good thing if you like the old transparency. The command-line interface is really made for Unix lovers.

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