

Golden Image or Foil Ball? (VM maintenance issues) - dpritchett
http://madstop.com/2009/02/04/golden-image-or-foil-ball/

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blasdel
_The essential basis of running services in “the cloud” is that they run in
virtual machines_

The fuck it isn't -- “the cloud” is so much more than the x86 provisioning
frippery of EC2 et. al. They provide no logical abstraction, only a physical
one.

Hadoop, S3, Google App Engine, Heroku, and other real platforms let you
completely avoid dealing with machine-level bullshit.

~~~
moe
_Hadoop, S3, Google App Engine, Heroku, and other real platforms let you
completely avoid dealing with machine-level bullshit._

The problem is that their constraints rule them out for a wide variety of use-
cases, I'd go as far as to say: most use-cases.

When building anything serious (and no, the next twitter-bot doesn't qualify)
you quickly realize that you'll have to deal with at least some of the
machine-level bullshit - because otherwise you'd be either paying through your
nose, or simply not be able to implement what you need.

