Cloud Computing is the panacea of all things! It will make you rich in seconds! It will prevent hair loss, reconnect you with lost friends and family, find you a mate for life and get you a PhD in the process. With those kind of promises, what’s not to love!

But seriously though, everyone is jumping on the bandwagon about touting the strengths of the Cloud. So let’s take a “negative” look at this.

• No Stress– with the Cloud, say good-bye to those loud datacenters and worrying about the electromagnetic radiation giving you a tan. Simply fire up a web-browser, log in and instantly deploy a handful of servers in the Cloud in minutes.
• Hang up on your Sales Rep/Just say “no” – tired of having to work through a pushy sales rep who is trying to sell you infrastructure and their grandmother’s old Volvo? Just say “buh-bye” and DIY (Do It Yourself). (I’m sure our GoGrid sales reps will beat me up over this idea…BUT, on the flipside, our sales reps CAN be a good resource for you and give you technical expertise and additional discounts not available for DIY-ers.)
• “No Commitment” in the Cloud is a Good Thing unlike people relationships – is your significant other pushing you into a corner? Do you cringe when you hear the word “commitment”? The Cloud is something that lets you avoid that nasty “C” word. No Contracts = No Commitment & No Crap!
• No Heavy Lifting – so, when you signed your employment application, did your HR folks, founders, owners or whomever tell you that you had to lug servers and other hardware around? Have you EVER tried to slide a 50 lb database server into a tiny rack or cage, only to find out that the rails weren’t the right type? Do you even know how heavy a back-up power diesel generator is? Guess what, Cloud servers are weightless.
• No Cranky Datacenter Techs – “the website is down!” Have you all seen this incredibly funny video? [Note: there is some swearing and "questionable" content in the video…you have been warned.] Have you actually gone through this scenario? With the Cloud, you don’t have to deal with these types…you can just be cranky with yourself!
• No Office required – just like not having to have a datacenter, you don’t need an office either. Do everything from your computer wherever you are.
• No Hardware – well this is an obvious one, so much so, we registered the domain!
• No Over-using your Carbon Credits – running your own server or even a datacenter is like chugging along in a 70′s-era gas guzzler. Save the planet now! Clouds are good in so many ways. They are greener, more efficient and better for the environment.
• No Lost Business – if your business becomes popular, are you ready for it? If you under-bought your hardware, probably not. Just say “goodbye” to all of those eyeballs and monetary transactions as your hardware strains to keep up. Did you over-buy it all? Good job! You are eating up power you don’t even need…and your CFO is probably deducting it from your next year’s budget or, gasp, your paycheck. Scaling up and down with the Cloud makes you smart, saves you money and most importantly, keeps your customers happy!
• No Killing Trees– tired of all of the paperwork and approvals involved in requisitioning servers? Just don’t do it any more. With the Cloud, all you need is a credit card and some lofty ideas. Pump some more oxygen into the air by going with the super easy process of click and deploy with only a credit card and some visionary thoughts in your head.
• No Dial-up Hosting – rural IT got you down? Are you hosting with a local mom & pop who may not work if there is a blizzard or rainstorm? Make your move out of the backwoods and into the future through the hosting in the Cloud.
• No Barriers – especially with GoGrid, you aren’t bogged down with proprietary standards or limits. You do what you want, when you want to. You have full control! “Control in the Cloud™”
• No CapEx – buying servers is “old school” and a pain in the butt. Did you forget to request that extra NIC when you placed your order? By the way, GoGrid Cloud servers come with 2 right “out of the box,” one for public networking and one for private.
• No Purchase Decision Risk – well, at least with GoGrid, you can try it all out on our dime! I’m not sure if I can say that about the other Cloud vendors out there. Personally, I wish I could try EVERYTHING before I buy it!
• No Cabling – does your server environment look like this? What about this? This looks a bit better, but think about the hours that went into it (the last picture is from our datacenter, those other ones aren’t). Leave the spaghetti on your plate where it should be. Wiring is a thing of the past! It simply doesn’t exist in the Cloud!
• No Shirt Required – heck, if you want to set up and run your Cloud infrastructure naked, I’m all for it! Do it from the privacy of your home, the bathroom or the top of a mountain somewhere.^[1]
• No Limits – well, since you are already in the Clouds, the sky is the limit. Leave the infrastructure to us and pour your ideas and dreams into your code.

Enough said? Just say NO to the “old way” of doing IT and YES to the Cloud! Remember, it takes fewer facial muscles to smile than it does to frown.

1. Internet connection required – duh! [↩]

This morning we announced that Appistry EAF Community Edition has been released within the GoGrid cloudcenter infrastructure. The press release can be viewed here. Full contents of the release are below.

Appistry and GoGrid Announce Commercial Availability of Joint Cloud Computing Solution for Delivering Highly Scalable and Reliable Server Applications

Cloud Computing Infrastructure provider GoGrid and Cloud Application Platform provider Appistry announce the release of Appistry EAF Community Edition within the GoGrid cloudcenter.

San Francisco, CA February 26, 2009 — GoGrid, the Cloud Computing division of ServePath, LLC and Appistry today released new tools for developers, architects and administrators designed to ease the pain associated with developing, deploying and managing applications in the Cloud. Appistry’s Cloud application platform, named Appistry EAF, helps businesses and enterprises efficiently manage and scale their applications within the GoGrid infrastructure. With this joint solution, larger companies are able to take full advantage of the Cloud’s unique value proposition of elastic scalability, solid reliability, automated management and CapEx economies.

Appistry EAF Community Edition 3.9 is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 users. Additional EAF-enabled GoGrid images will be rolling out in the near future. Appistry EAF Community Edition allows developers, system architects and administrators to take advantage of Appistry’s Cloud application platform for free on up to five GoGrid Cloud Server instances. Appistry EAF functionality and benefits include:

• Transparent and instant linear scalability
• Application-level fault tolerance
• Broad support for Cloud-enabling software components
• Adaptive, software-based load balancing
• Fully-distributed, fault tolerant memory cache for objects and data
• Fine-grained, hierarchical security model
• Efficiencies in CapEx and administrator time
• Ease of use

More information on Appistry EAF can be found at: http://www.appistry.com/products/eaf/index.html

“The GoGrid partnership is part of Appistry’s strategy to address the complex challenges enterprises face developing, deploying and managing applications in both public and private Clouds,” said Sam Charrington, Appistry vice president of product management and marketing. “End-users demand a platform which sits above the infrastructure and allows enterprises to more easily realize its full promise — elastic scalability, solid reliability and automated management.”

The combination of GoGrid’s robust and flexible Cloud Computing infrastructure and Appistry’s Cloud application platform enables enterprises to capitalize on the inherent advantages of both technologies. GoGrid leads the Cloud infrastructure space with a full assortment of infrastructure capabilities available in the Cloud, including industry standard and best practice implementations of Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS instances among others, as well as free hardware-based f5 load balancing and hybrid hosting capabilities with Cloud Connect which is particularly efficient for complex Microsoft SQL Server databases.

“The GoGrid and Appistry partnership clearly demonstrates our commitment to helping businesses optimize their infrastructure to gain the advantages of Cloud Computing,” said GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, adding “Companies would be foolish to not optimize their business and technology strategies using the power of Appistry EAF and GoGrid’s Cloud infrastructure.”

About GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com)

GoGrid is the leading Cloud Computing, hosted, Internet provider that delivers true “Control in the Cloud™” in the form of cloudcenters. GoGrid enables system administrators, developers, IT professionals and SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors to create, deploy, and control load balanced cloud servers and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access and administrative server control. GoGrid server instances maintain the industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn and adapt to propriety standards. Bringing up servers and server networks takes minutes via a unique web control panel or GoGrid’s award winning API. GoGrid delivers portal controlled servers for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, ASP.NET, multiple Linux operating systems (Red Hat Enterprise and CentOS) and supports application environments like Ruby on Rails. Free f5 hardware load balancing and other features are included to give users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud, a “cloudcenter.” GoGrid won the coveted 2008 LinuxWorld Expo’s Best of Show award.

About ServePath (http://www.servepath.com)

ServePath, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is the leading managed and dedicated hosted server provider, delivering custom solutions and managed services to businesses that require powerful Internet hosting platforms for their production environments. Thousands of companies worldwide look to ServePath for its reliability, customization, and speed. ServePath has a Keynote-rated A+ network and guarantees uptime with a 10,000% guaranteed™ Service Level Agreement. The employee-owned company has been in business for nine years and operates its own San Francisco data center and is SAS70 Type II certified.

About Appistry (http://www.appistry.com)

Appistry simplifies cloud computing for the enterprise, opening the door to more agile and scalable IT environments. Appistry’s application platform delivers solutions for the complex challenges of building, deploying and managing a wide variety of applications and services for both public and private clouds. Appistry’s products are designed specifically for cloud environments, delivering transparent scalability, application-level fault tolerance, and automated management to new and existing applications. Appistry customers include FedEx, GeoEye, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. For more information about Appistry, please visit www.appistry.com.

Information on Appistry and other GoGrid Partners can be found here. For Appistry support-related questions, visit the Appistry site or see the Appistry partner page.

By now, many in the Cloud Computing space have heard about (or even read) the University of California Electrical Engineering & Computer Science’s (EECS) study on Cloud Computing titled: “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.” Published on February 10th, 2009, the EECS’s paper provides a seemingly academic study of the Cloud Computing movement, attempts to explain what Cloud Computing is all about, and identifies potential opportunities as well as challenges present within the market.

The 20+ page study is authored by Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David A. Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia who all work in RAD Lab. (Interestingly, several of the companies mentioned within the study are also Founding Sponsors and/or affiliate members: Sun, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, etc.).

There has already been plenty of discussion and analysis of this study (by James Urquhart, Krishna Sankar and has even appeared on Slashdot.org). Needless to say, I felt compelled to get my two cents in, especially from the perspective of a Cloud Computing Infrastructure vendor.

From an academic standpoint, this document definitely has some legs. It is complete with carefully thought out scenarios, examples and even formulae, as well as graphs and tables. Some of the points that are brought up even got me scratching my head (e.g., using flash memory to help by “adding another relatively fast layer to the classic memory hierarchy”). Even the case analysis of a DDoS attack from a cost perspective of those initiating an attack to those warding off an attack on a Cloud was interesting to ponder. I commend these group of authors on undertaking such a grand task of not only writing by committee but also overlaying a very business school vs. mathematics and computer sciences approach to the writing and analysis.

Unfortunately, however, as I read through the document, I started scrawling madly in the margins with commentary that is somewhat contrary to what was written within the study.

A Few Comments from the “Peanut Gallery”

I don’t want my article to come off as a complete rebuttal to what is written in this study. Quite the contrary. I’m encouraged that one group within the academic community has taken considerable time and effort analyzing and writing about the Cloud. What appears below is a small “laundry list” of things that need to be called out and is a mixture of positive and negative comments:

• EECS’s Cloud Computing definition – “Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud.”^[1]
  My comments: I personally found this definition to be incomplete and potentially misleading. While the EECS is correct in including SaaS (Cloud Applications) as a subset of Cloud Computing, they have (consciously?) lumped everything else into a catch-all phrase of “hardware and system software.” For people to truly understand Cloud Computing, I feel that it is important to become much more granular in defining the layers of the Cloud (Cloud Applications, Cloud Platforms and Cloud Infrastructure – the “Cloud Pyramid”, a term I coined last year). I actually found it interesting that the group of authors couldn’t agree what the precise differences between the “X as a Service” were.^[2] In order for all of the assumptions and conclusions to take place, I would have thought that clearly defining what the “Cloud” is would be paramount to the success of the findings.
• 3 Important Technical Aspects of the Cloud – the group outlines three items of the Cloud: 1) “infinite computing resources” 2) “elimination of an up-front commitment” and 3) “pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed.”^[3]
  My comments: For the most part, I agree with these statements. However, #3 is a bit skewed towards an Amazon EC2 model. At GoGrid, we are pioneering the idea of a “cloudcenter” (a datacenter in the Cloud) which presents a different paradigm. EC2 has long been touted as being a way for quick batch processing where instances are spun up, consumed and then discarded. This falls within the third aspect that is defined above. However, when you take the view of creating a “datacenter in the cloud,” there is less of a “quick use function” and more of a scalable infrastructure notion designed to replace traditional datacenters and associate infrastructures.
• New Application Opportunities – several new or emerging opportunities designed to capitalize on the benefits of the Cloud are outlined: “mobile interactive applications,” “parallel batch processing,” “the rise of analytics, extension of compute-intensive desktop applications,” and “‘earthbound’ applications.”^[4]
  My comments: I’m actually glad to see these so carefully explained as they do cover many aspects that are potentially “unique” to the Cloud: dynamic storage, dynamic availability, scalable processing and compute power, and cost-effectiveness to name a few.
• Classes of Utility Computing – Amazon’s EC2 is at one end of the spectrum and Google AppEngine and Force.com is at “the other extreme” with Microsoft Azure falling somewhere in the middle. Also, “virtualized resources” are broken up into 3 classes: Computation, Storage and Networking^[5]
  My comments: For starters, since the group was unable to fully define the Cloud “spectrum,” it’s difficult to understand how they place EC2 at one end and having the spectrum “end” at Cloud Platforms (e.g., Force.com or AppEngine). The “full” spectrum must include SaaS as well as PaaS and IaaS in order to fully encompass the definition. Gmail and SalesForce exemplify SaaS and definitely should be contained within the Cloud mantra. Microsoft Azure, Force.com and Google AppEngine are truly Cloud Platform. Perhaps within the Platform layer, Azure and AppEngine are far between, they do, however, occupy the same Cloud space of “here is a development environment, you must work within it” (e.g., Python, .NET). Cloud Applications are simply “here is a web-based software application that is available for consumption and you have minimal flexibility in terms of controlling it.” Lastly, Cloud Infrastructure works as “enjoy full control over your infrastructure despite the fact that it is a bit more challenging to control.” For the most part, the 3 virtualized resources do fall within what is outlined. Storage can be expanded to include “Cloud Storage” (dynamic), “Persistent Storage” (traditional) and “Volatile or Temporary Storage” (typically associated with EC2 instances where storage disappears when the EC2 instance is destroyed or goes down).

I could probably nitpick through some other items, but I will leave that up to you.

Comments from a Cloud Vendor perspective

In Section 7 of the study, the EECS group presents “10 Obstacles and Opportunities for Cloud Computing” which definitely should be addressed. For this section, I’m putting on my “GoGrid Green” colored glasses and presenting points and counter-points to each of the 10 items outlined. Again, this is not intended to come off as a ping-pong match, but rather a commentary and opportunity for dialog. I encourage you to read this section prior to reviewing my responses. I have tried to briefly paraphrase each item (but that probably doesn’t do it justice).

1. Availability of a Service – “will Utility Computing services have adequate availability”^[6]
   My Response: The study outlines outages specific to the Cloud, citing S3, AppEngine and Gmail in particular. I have said this before, outages happen and they are not unique to the Cloud. Natural and human-caused disasters occur. Hurricanes and cable cuts can affect all sorts of infrastructure. As with a traditional datacenter, in-house or outsourced, traditional or in the Cloud, a disaster failover and redundancy strategy should be part of an IT department’s general strategy for success or just survival. One thing to consider is mirroring or creating redundancy on different types of infrastructures: if your primary is in the Cloud, have a dedicated failover; if your colo is on the East Coast, think about something on the West. Also look beyond simply the service and review the Support organization, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the provider’s expertise within the field. GoGrid, for example, has 24×7 Free support, the most robust SLA of any Cloud provider and over 9 years of hosting experience and expertise.
2. Data Lock-in – “the API’s for Cloud Computing itself are still essentially proprietary”^[7]
   My Response: Unfortunately it seems that GoGrid’s announcement back in January of this year where we discussed how our GoGrid cloudcenter API has been put under a Creative Commons Sharealike license was somehow overlooked when compiling facts for this study. Our idea behind this move is to start working standards from the ground up. GoGrid is also an active participant in many of the interoperability meetings around the country. Part of the reason why we released our API to the community at large is to demonstrate our commitment to open standards. We also have modeled the GoGrid cloudcenter extremely closely to a traditional datacenter where all of your hardware, protocols and connectivity is familiar. This helps lessen the “lock-in” scenario and avoids the use of proprietary API’s and other components. Also mentioned is “surge computing” which is another term for “cloud bursting” or “hybrid” clouds. Our Cloud Connect offering works exactly in this way, where users can opt to have high-end, large I/O databases, for example, reside within a traditional, managed hosting environment (through ServePath, our parent company). Cloud Connect allows for scalable and dynamic web front-ends, hosted in the GoGrid Cloud, to connect via a dedicate private network to higher-end servers in a managed hosting back-end.
3. Data Confidentiality and Auditability – “current cloud offerings are essentially public (rather than private) networks, exposing the system to more attacks”^[8]
   My Response: The statement above is rather alarmist in nature. I agree that many efforts should be made to ensure the resiliency and security of the Cloud, and these efforts are well underway at GoGrid as well as other Cloud providers. Again, however, this is not something completely unique to the Cloud. Any hosting provider or datacenter (or cloudcenter for that matter) must ensure that security and the integrity of the network and infrastructure is maintained at a high standard. GoGrid, for example, is SAS70 Type II audited and certified. The EECS’s statement, however, is not a completely honest assessment. Public vs. Private datacenters, dedicated hosting or clouds are very different. The concerns of publically hosted infrastructures are really no different whether in the cloud or in a datacenter; they will both be inherently a bit more vulnerable. However, I would say that companies whose business it is to solely do hosting will potentially have more robust security protection and attack prevention measures in place than a self-hosted or even private cloud would. In terms of HIPAA compliance or Sarbanes-Oxley, there are stringent requirements of data protection, privacy and isolation. While it may be difficult to pass accreditation for these types of compliances “in the cloud”, using a feature like Cloud Connect, for example, allows for compliance to take place on a dedicated, warehoused set of servers within a traditional datacenter, something much more palpable and acceptable.
4. Data Transfer Bottlenecks – “applications continue to become more data-intensive”^[9]
   My Response: It’s all about the data, I agree. The Cloud is an ideal environment for statistical analysis and number crunching. I personally know of one GoGrid user who would spin up multiple instances of GoGrid servers, upload a huge amount of data, run some analysis programs and then export the resulting summaries, all in a matter of hours and only costing a few dollars. The arguments presented by the EECS group are true; until we get the ability to transfer large amounts of data through very big pipes at a extremely lost cost, this could be a barrier for those customers who may be considering the Cloud as a data eating machine. However, when we at GoGrid designed our business model, we kept scenarios like this in mind and came up with an easy solution: make all inbound data transfers free. This way, GoGrid users can upload large amounts of data to their cloudcenter, move that data around within the private network therein, put some on Cloud Storage should they desire, analyze to their hearts content and then download the summary or result sets (typically much smaller in file size than the data going in). GoGrid does charge for outbound but you can see how the pricing model works to the user’s advantage in analysis scenarios.
5. Performance Unpredictability – “multiple Virtual Machines can share CPUs and main memory surprisingly well in Cloud Computing, but that I/O sharing is more problematic”^[10]
   My Response: This is a very good point and difficult to fully refute. It’s true that CPU and RAM can be virtualized, managed and isolated extremely well. Disk I/O performance can suffer at times. Again, this is part of the reason we offer a solution for this with Cloud Connect (see previous statements). It is frequently better to offload extremely intensive I/O processes to a dedicated environment, at least until virtualization technology gets more aligned with bare-metal performance. We even released a “custom patch” for 64-bit Linux users on GoGrid that helps increase disk drive performance. While some may says that this is a bit non-standard, it does show our understanding of this concern and marks an effort to resolve or minimize the impact.
6. Scalable Storage – short-term usage, no up-front cost and infinite capacity on-demand doesn’t apply to persistent storage^[11]
   My Response: I have to agree somewhat to this idea, however it is a bit of an oxymoron. Persistent storage requires that it is dedicated in some way, available at all times and easily usable. On EC2, for example, if your instance dies, you lose any persistence of data, which is part of the reason why they recommend using S3 (their Cloud Storage offering). This is logical from so many standpoints: redundancy & share-ability are two that immediately jump to mind. Again, at GoGrid we took a slightly different approach by making all GoGrid Cloud servers have persistent storage available from the beginning. The amount of persistent storage is directly tied to the amount of RAM you have allocated: if you choose a higher RAM instance, you get more persistent storage. However, I don’t see scalable storage to be an obstacle entirely. Amazon offers S3 and GoGrid has a similar Cloud Storage offering. Both are scalable on demand, billed by usage and usable by Cloud Servers. GoGrid’s Cloud Storage is mountable as a drive and shareable among a user’s GoGrid servers within the GoGrid infrastructure using industry standard protocols (e.g., SAMBA, CIFS, RSYNC & SCP). To that end, in my mind it does meet the 3 properties outlined with the omission of the “persistent” adjective.
7. Bugs in Large-Scale Distributed Systems – “one of the difficult challenges in Cloud Computing is removing errors in these very large scale distributed systems”^[12]
   My Response: This is actually one obstacle that I fully agree with. Often it is difficult to “mirror” physical, large scale computing environments within the Cloud. Unfortunately, it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. One simply cannot just “port” a physical, complex infrastructure over to the Cloud. If you do, you will fail. You need to architect your Cloud environment capitalizing on the efficiencies and features of the Cloud. Otherwise, you simply translate (and potentially compound) issues existing previously further. Another thing to consider is that all Virtualization or Hypervisor technologies have bugs, as with any software for that matter. The complexity of a Cloud environment is multi-fold: at the hypervisor and management layer, the hardware layer of the grid or utility architecture, as well as within the VM’s themselves. This is a complicated and delicate environment. The good news is, because this is technology that is around to stay, and is consistently being built upon, refined and improved, the end results are only improvements. Important to this again is interoperability and standards, similar to the Wild West becoming civilized and engineered. Bugs will be squashed and efficiencies gained through increased R&D efforts as well as customer adoption and validation.
8. Scaling Quickly – “automatically scale quickly up and down in response to load in order to save money, but without violating SLAs”^[13]
   My Response:  This is one of the key value propositions of Cloud Computing. You must be able to scale up and down based on demand (or even based on a budget). Much of this can be done using API’s or companies like RightScale. As I mentioned previously, Design for the Cloud. Traditionally, companies over-bought their infrastructure, saving it all for a rainy day. At ServePath, we know for a fact that CPU, RAM and Storage on our dedicated machines are only hitting about a 5% utilization on average. Many companies have built up their infrastructure for the “what if” scenarios. These inefficiencies are part of the reason why Cloud Computing has become so popular, a panacea of sorts. When you design for the cloud, you must ensure that your strategy capitalizes on scalability, both up and down, but also on redundancy and persistence. Of course, it all depends on the type of system you are architecting (persistent – a store-front or content driven marketplace, or temporary – data analysis, bulk processing).
9. Reputation Fate Sharing – “reputations do not virtualize well”^[14]
   My Response: I feel that this fully depends on how a Cloud provider crafts their offering. The example given in the EECS study is that of blacklisted EC2 IP addresses due to spamming. This is a valid concern but is due to how AWS releases their public IP address back “into the pool” once an instance is removed or destroyed. At GoGrid, we took a different approach. For starters, all users are assigned a contiguous block of static public IP addresses. When a GoGrid user deletes a server, that public IP address is released back into THEIR pool and not a general pool. Thus, if an IP address gets flagged by a spam-prevention service as being “bad,” the “bad reputation” is contained within a particular GoGrid user’s environment and not the entire GoGrid user base. Similarly, by default, we block all outbound SMTP traffic by default. Users who wish to use this protocol must request this block be lifted. Also, while somewhat inconvenient, this one-time action does help to maintain a positive reputation for a vendor as a whole. Be sure to carefully review a vendor’s SLA, Terms of Service (TOS), Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
10. Software Licensing – “licensing models for commercial software is not a good match to Utility Computing” & “pay-as-you-go seems incompatible with the quarterly sales tracking”^[15]
    My Response: Software licensing models are being forced to evolve to be able to handle the on-demand nature of the Cloud. While Amazon took the approach of increasing the hourly charge to handle licensing of Windows Server vs. an open-source alternative, GoGrid, in order to maintain simplicity, rolled it all into one (no difference between Red Hat, CentOS or Windows). Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server on GoGrid, for example, is handled through a monthly (not hourly) charge. This helps with both a customers budget projections as well as from our own sales projections. Simplicity in explanation and execution is critical. If your user is confused as to how the billing works or how to project what charges they will incur, they will not execute. Token billing, tied to hourly charges will also become increasingly prevalent.

Summing it all up

If you made it both through the EECS group’s study as well as this blog post, I truly commend you, and you hopefully have a better understanding of the Cloud Computing term and properties therein, especially from the standpoint of an academic institution and Cloud Computing vendor. While I have challenged a few of the statements made within the study, there are others that stand up just fine. The important overall idea here is that serious brainpower and resources are being thrown at the Cloud, from understanding and analysis standpoint to development and execution therein.

A special message to the EECS group: I would personally like to invite you all cross the Bay (from Berkeley to San Francisco) to come and visit a Cloud Computing provider who is already overcoming the obstacles you have outlined. We would love to have a round-table discussion about the Cloud and help you with the next version of this study.

1. M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. Joseph, R. Katz, A. Konwinski, G. Lee, D. Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, and M. Zaharia. Feb 10, 2009. “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.” Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. University of California at Berkeley. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.html p. 4 [↩]
2. ibid. p. 4 [↩]
3. ibid. p. 4 [↩]
4. ibid. pp. 7-8 [↩]
5. ibid. pp. 8-9 [↩]
6. ibid. pp. 14-15 [↩]
7. ibid. p. 15 [↩]
8. ibid. pp. 15-16 [↩]
9. ibid. pp. 16-17 [↩]
10. ibid. pp. 17-18 [↩]
11. ibid. p. 18 [↩]
12. ibid. p. 18 [↩]
13. ibid. p. 18 [↩]
14. ibid. p. 18 [↩]
15. ibid. p. 19 [↩]

Last week, we quietly released some new larger GoGrid Cloud server instances. Today we are making that announcement a bit louder. What does this mean to you? Well, your GoGrid cloudcenter just got a bit broader and more powerful. For a year now, we have been offering 0.5, 1 and 2 Gigabyte RAM options in both Windows and Linux, now we have 4 and 8 GB RAM instances available. These larger instances, available on all 64-bit operating systems, allow for new types of higher-end environments to be spun up using all of the characteristics of Cloud Computing.

The lower size RAM instances (0.5, 1 & 2 GB) are perfect for a web front-end, where either Apache or IIS are running. For extremely high-performance and high I/O instances, we have been offering Cloud Connect as a way to create a dedicated hybrid infrastructure where Cloud Web Servers running on GoGrid can be linked via private dedicated network connections to dedicated and managed servers within the ServePath network.

With the new 4 and 8 GB RAM options, you can now set up a infrastructure with a robust set of high-performance application servers within the Cloud. These types of high RAM instances are perfect for users who want to take advantage of the increased RAM, CPU cores and persistent storage, especially when used in conjunction with specific applications (e.g., Microsoft SQL server or other Enterprise applications) that require more larger amounts of resources like RAM or CPU.

The 4 GB RAM server images can be deployed via the GoGrid web portal and API. The 8 GB RAM server images currently may only be deployed via the GoGrid API. I recommend reading the API section of the GoGrid wiki in order to fully understand how to deploy 8 GB RAM instances.

The 4 and 8 GB RAM images, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, CentOS 5.1, and Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 64-bit operating systems bring a new level of performance to the GoGrid line. 4 GB Cloud Servers have 3 CPU Cores and 8 GB have 6 CPU Cores, ensuring dedicated CPU allocations and high performance.

All GoGrid Cloud Servers come with persistent storage. The new larger RAM allocations announced today, are delivered with increased persistent storage: 4 GB Cloud Servers have 240 GB of hard drive space and 8 GB have 480 GB of storage allocated at boot time. Additional storage can be added using GoGrid’s dynamically scalable Cloud Storage offering which includes a 10 GB free allotment to start with. Each 1 GB thereafter costs $0.15/GB/month.

Our current breakdown of GoGrid Cloud Servers and associated RAM/CPU/Persistent Storage is as follows:

Further information on the new 4 and 8 GB RAM GoGrid Cloud Servers can be found on the GoGrid site. Server Release Information on these new images can be found on the GoGrid wiki. We have also posted a Server Compatibility Matrix that graphically shows what server instances are available with the associated RAM allocations.

If you are a Windows user, we ask that you please our Release and Errata pages as there are some known issues specific to 8 GB Windows Servers which may require a workaround and that they should be aware of before using 8 GB GoGrid Servers with Windows.

Our full Press Release on this information can be viewed here as well as on the GoGrid site.

As always, please leave any questions or comments here on this blog post, or open a Support case via the GoGrid portal should you need technical assistance.

In our efforts to continually improve the GoGrid platform, we have released a new kernel patch for our 64-bit Linux customers which can dramatically improve performance.

NOTE: This update only applies to GoGrid customers. Users of other Linux distributions OUTSIDE of GoGrid should NOT apply this patch.

This kernel patch is relatively trivial to install and under some circumstances will dramatically improve disk drive performance.

To install the kernel patch, log into any 64-bit Linux (RHEL or CentOS) server in your GoGrid cloud that was instantiated before 2/12/09.

From the command line, enter the following command on your 64-bit Linux server:

rm ˆf pviofix.sh ; wget ftp://ftp.gogrid.com/pviofix.sh && bash pviofix.sh

Please note that this will require a reboot of your system. GoGrid strongly recommends you apply this patch to improve your system performance.

If you experience any issues or if you require assistance installing this patch, please contact our Support team at 1.877.946.4743 or log a support case via the GoGrid portal.

We appreciate your cooperation in applying this patch.