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

 

The fine print
One of the ways to go truly insane is to read the terms of service for these clouds. While the people who wrote the old co-location contracts could try to imagine the data as living on a single server that was in a certain box owned by a certain person and residing in a certain jurisdiction, all bets are off with a cloud. The whole point is that it isn't confined to one box, one building, or even one country.

Some of the service agreements are very specific and clear. GoGrid, for instance, spells out numerical thresholds for standard values such as latency, jitter, and packet loss for the six continents. If the cloud doesn't meet them, GoGrid promises to give you service credits for 100 times the amount lost.

Other terms are deliberately murky. You might consider it fairly capricious for Amazon to demand the right to terminate your account "for any reason" and "at any time," but the company also carefully reserves the right to terminate your account for "no reason" too. In other words, "It's not you, honest. It's me. No. I take that back, it's not even me. It's just over between the two of us. No reason."

Google's terms seem more generous, indicating it will terminate accounts only if you breach the terms of the agreement or do something unlawful. But Google does reserve the right to "pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse, or remove any or all Content from the Service." I want to say that the terms seem more reasonable than they were when I read them several weeks ago, but I can't be sure. And it doesn't matter too much because new terms apply whenever Google wants to change them, and you signify your acceptance by continuing to use the service.

If you think it's hard to work through the legal rules when a server is in one state and a user is in another, imagine the right answer when your virtual server could migrate within a cloud that might encompass datacenters spread out across the globe. Amazon's terms, for instance, prohibit you from posting content that might be "discriminatory based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age." It sounds like Amazon is worried that part of the cloud might touch down in a municipality that forbids things like this.

It almost seems scary to mention this fact, but New York is insisting that Amazon charge sales taxes because Amazon pays a commission to Web sites that do business in the state. What does this mean for applications hosted by Amazon? Do you owe sales tax if your application touches down in a part of the cloud that's in New York? Do you owe income tax?

I wanted to make some allusion to Schrodinger's cat and imply that we can't know where the computation occurs in the cloud, but then I slowly realized that this is far from true. Cloud servers have log files too, and these log files can produce insanely detailed analyses of who might owe which taxes. Major league athletes already hire tax attorneys to compute their share of income earned in each stadium, and some people are suggesting that Web companies aren't paying enough to support the local fire trucks and orphanages. Say good-bye allusions to Joni Mitchell; it's time to start invoking Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money."

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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