

The "Cloud": who's really using it? - acl

The cloud buzz has reached a fever pitch. So who is actually using cloud computing, and for what?<p>To clarify, I'm talking about computation (EC2), not file stores (S3). Furthermore, I am excluding traditional VPS providers (Slicehost, Linode, etc -- don't get me wrong I love both of them). So cloud services would include, but not be limited to: EC2, AppEngine, Rackspace Cloud/Mosso, Heroku type of services.<p>So, are you using cloud services, and for what? Your whole infrastructure or just part of it? How big are you?<p>I'm also curious about auto-scaling. Of course auto-scaling sounds amazing, but when I think of the hard problems that need to be solved during the scaling process, most usually aren't solved by bolting on more hardware (virtual or not).<p>So who's really using auto-scaling? Does it work for you?
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sanswork
I started on Amazon grew to something like 30 servers on there doing a variety
of tasks in a few groupings(Server group A has 5 servers all the same + load
balancer for example). Used scalr.net to manage it and thought it was great.

I've recently started moving everything over to GoGrid(20+ servers there now)
since I needed to be on the west coast for latency issues. I'm not as big of a
fan of their services but it's ok for what it is. I still have a number of
complaints though not as many as last time I wrote about it.

I also have a hand full of servers with rackspace cloud for redundancy but
they get very little use at the moment.

Also our whole external infrastructure is now in the cloud. We have one server
with softlayer and a mail server that are separate. In house we have another
15 or so servers for log processing.

We use autoscaling or rather did when with amazon using scalr and once I get
my puppet setup running fully on GoGrid I'll be developing one there too. The
problems I face can entirely be solved just by adding more hardware since all
my systems are modular so it works well for me but your mileage may very.

Scalr support autoscaling by things like load/ram/bandwidth as well which is
nice since a lot of times you need to scale out for different reasons.

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agmiklas
We're using AWS EC2 mostly because they're the only hosting provider we were
able to find that offered high-speed connections between their data centers.
We use this capability to synchronously replicate every transaction to at
least two data centers. The plan is that we should be able to cut over to
another data center without losing any committed transactions.

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byoung2
I'm using Mosso/Rackspace Cloud for a web design business. I wanted clients to
be able to scale up without hitting bottlenecks or affecting other sites on
the server.

It isn't perfect, but it has a few huge advantages. The biggest plus is that
Rackspace handles all of the auto-scaling, so it is plug and play in that
sense. You code it and load it, and if you need more PHP power or more
database muscle, the system takes care of it for you. Great for blogs that may
hit the front page of Digg (www.techspyer.com is a Wordpress install of mine
that's on Mosso hosting and it works for that application).

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jhammerb
SoftLayer's bare server API (<http://softlayer.com/resources_api.html>) and
monthly pricing have suited our needs nicely. We've seen seen two problems (a
porn site in the same datacenter sometimes gets DDOSed and the firewall in one
data center is remarkably flaky), and they've been remarkably quick to respond
to each.

The amount of tooling around the Amazon ecosystem is nice, but we mostly just
use it for automating builds.

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joevandyk
Why exclude slicehost and linode? they have APIs for starting/stopping slices.

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acl
Just trying to put somewhat of a box around what the "cloud" is. Especially
since we're getting (I feel) saturated with the term. I put Linode and
Slicehost in a non-cloud category because you pay by the month and the options
for programmatic instantiation are limted. But yeah, I acknowledge that the
lines get blurry.

