Re: The Business of Building Clouds

On 5-Jun-08, at 8:35 AM, Alan Ho wrote:

Picking a provider that has data center failover is critical - but it does mean that you write your application in a way that can failover gracefully. Cloud providers need to provide the base infrastructure to do so OR constrain the user to a particular programming paradigm (like the limitations of google app engine)

That's a very astute observation, Alan.    Constraining an architecture to induce certain properties (guarantees?) is likely the right approach.  

 Though I wonder if AppEngine is a bit too "Nanny-ish" that limit its audience in ways that don't really impact the big picture qualities.   

For example, the choice of Python was easy because it was a standard Google language, but that doesn't seem to be inherently a more applicable language than say C#, Java or Ruby.

I expect in the future that cloud computing systems will provide the concept of "cloud events" in case of major datacenter failures. I just don't see any way round it.

I wonder if Google actually provides this sort of failover for AppEngine today.   Certainly, they could, though they provide no such guarantees at the moment.

As for "cloud events" - yup.   In the traditional data centre, it's likely SNMP or JMX traps.   On the cloud, it's not entirely clear if/where SNMP would play.   Or WS-Man.   Or something newer (?).

Cheers

Stu

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