Cloud Computing: Amazon, Joyent, etc.

Cloud Computing: Amazon, Joyent, etc.

Abstract:
Cloud computing is no panacea - it is just a single tool in the tool belt of the Infrastructure Architect. There are concerns and options for customers to be concerned about.



One Vendor Example:
For people depending upon Cloud Computing, it should be noted that one of the most famous vendors, Amazon, even experiences outages. On 2011 April 21, there was a 10 hour outage. Amazon referred to it as a "network outage", but some data was irreconcilably lost.



Another Vendor:
Other vendors are experienced in the cloud computing model. Joyent has been providing cloud computing expertise since 2004. Joyent provides superior disk, cpu, and memory performance over Amazon. Amazon is clearly not the only game in town.


Programming Models:
Joyent offers varied cloud platform models, but perhaps one of their most interesting model is based upon Node.js, where event driven server side programming can be done with Javascript in a cloud as a service.

Conclusion:
Don't use customer facing applications, which should require H-A capability, solely in the cloud. If you have a customer facing application that is mission critical, ensure your capability is replicated to another provider or keep primary or redundant resources under your own control. When choosing a vendor, keep in mind that there are many options to meet most business requirements.