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

 

Best and worst
After working through these systems, I tried to imagine the best and worst applications for these clouds. One of the best fits might be some kind of reservation system for weekend events like concerts. While there might be a small amount of the load at any time, the crunch would come each Friday afternoon when people realize they have no weekend plans. The cloud's ability to spin up more servers to handle this demand would fit this perfectly. The service might also take real reservations and sell tickets in advance, a service that would demand the higher qualities of service offered by the shared data stores.

The worst possible application might be something like RedSoxYankeesTrashTalk.com or any Web site filled with an endless stream of mostly forgettable comments trolling for reactions from the rival fans. While there might be a slight peak around game time, I've found that sites like this keep rolling along even late at night during the off-season. And such a site would certainly attract First Amendment proponents who would look for ways to write a single sentence that could zing all seven of Amazon's protected targets of discrimination.

Furthermore, there would be no reason to pay for high-quality storage because I'm sure that even the participants wouldn't notice if their comments disappeared by mistake. For fun, read Amazon's terms on getting your data back after they shut you down. While I would probably write the same thing if it were my cloud, there are plenty of examples of applications that are better off on their own.

These examples aren't perfect, of course, but neither is cloud computing. After a few weeks of building up some machines and hearing from people who've used the services, I'm pleasantly confused and filled with curious and optimistic questions. Will these clouds be large enough to handle the Internet equivalent of the Thanksgiving weekend traffic jams? Will the cloud teams be able to find a way to offer simple options that are priced correctly for the serious and not-so-serious data wrangler? Will they ever find an adequate meter for computation time?

I suspect the only people who know the answers to these questions today are living in the real clouds where they went after a life ministering to the IBM mainframes. If we could get those guys back here today, we might be able to get this cloud thing up and running smoothly. We just have to convince Intel to build a chip that understands IBM 360 binaries.

Peter Wayner is contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.

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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