Comments on: Let’s discuss Web Infrastructure

By: Aaron deMello

Aaron deMello — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:35:15 +0000

Great article. One clarification: Gigaspaces is not an “operational cloud” service provider – they sell a scalable application server and in-memory data grid. The software is available standalone, or as a service in partnership with RighScale so you can run it on EC2.

By: Heri

Heri — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:17:12 +0000

I also love the idea of on-demand infrastructure, as an entrepreneur. Having a service that auto-scales (up or down), that auto-manages itself, and where you pay-per use, is the way to go.

I think a web service should be hosted on the company’s managed servers, coupled with capacity from Amazon EC2 for temporary traffic spikes or occasional computing.

There is also another possibility, which is having dedicated servers hosting core services (like DNS, monitoring, email), while user requests and traffic are handled by EC2.

Alistair Croll seem to advise that everything shall be transferred to Amazon in the cloud.

By: Mark MacLeod

Mark MacLeod — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:32:20 +0000

Great article! From a financial perspective, I love that I can get capacity more or less on demand. However as Don Dodge points out, there are still some reliability issues:

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/06/amazon-twitter-disqus-down-do-you-really-want-your-data-in-the-cloud.html

I think it is important to look at the markets you serve. If you’re serving a mission critical app to business users, you can’t have a flaky back-end. If you’re serving a free app to consumers – well, you get what you pay for. Downtime is part of the story (for now at least).

Mark

By: Montreal Tech Watch

Montreal Tech Watch — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:20:46 +0000

Let’s discuss Web Infrastructure http://tinyurl.com/56o3l7

By: Aydin Mirzaee

Aydin Mirzaee — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:14:49 +0000

Good post. Interesting classification of Salesforce and Ning as “vertical” clouds.

Aydin.