<OT> clouds

[calcpage at aol.com]

A. Jorge Garcia
Applied Math and CompSci
http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009

-----Original Message-----
From: Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com>
To: "Ubuntu user technical support,
	not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Fri, 06 May 2011 4:54
Subject: Re: <OT> clouds

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 06:32, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know this is slightly OT, but what is the experience using the Ubuntu
> flavor of "the cloud" or just the "cloud" in general? I'm skeptical as
> all heck. One of of Non-Profit team members wants to put our financial
> data "out there" in google. Me, I'm going oh hell no! Are any of them
> particularly safe? Is running your own Ubuntu "cloud" better than the
> other offerings? More secure? The ultimate goal is to have being able to
> collaborate on the books, live, at different locations connected to the
> net. Me, I lean towards running our own server with a static IP address,
> as being as secure as we can make it. Which might be better than the
> commercial offerings. Plus, I'm making the case for Open Source, rather
> than MS.
>
> I just want to pick some brains here, to guide my own thinking.
>
> Thanks, Ric
>

Go read about the recent Amazon outages. Of course, that is on par
with regular hosting. But the addition of water vapor-saturated air
does _not_ make things more secure or resilient, no matter what the
propaganda. Also, as with regular hosting, have local backups! A KDE
dev just this week had his cloud host delete his backups by mistake.
And I personally had g.ho.st cloud computing close shop with my data,
with no way for me to access it. Luckily, I had local backups.

That said, cloud hosting is terrific for dynamic scalability. One
client of mine has a modest website that usually costs him about $3
USD per month. One month that was just shy of $20 USD, because he had
a huge spike in traffic. Other hosts would have shut him down, but the
cloud solution simply scaled. And he does not need to continue paying
$20 USD per month for fear of another traffic spike, as would be the
case with traditional hosting.

In short, view cloud computing an an abstraction that lets hardware
and resources scale with use. Nothing more.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com

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How about setting up an HPC Cloud locally on your LAN instead of an openMPI Cluster via Eucalyptus? Anyone have experience with this? Is that IaaS?

TIA,
A. Jorge Garcia 
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