

PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified. - ggruschow
http://www.picloud.com/

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imp
"Imagination at Work" - You probably shouldn't use that phrase next to a light
bulb on your home page. I'm not even going to bother to do the search, but I'm
100% sure that GE has that trademarked.

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nico_h
in the documentation it is written _"While the cloud module works well as a
drop-in solution for pure python code, it doesn’t handle python extensions
written in C/C++. If you use custom Python extensions that PiCloud does not
have installed, you’ll need to upload them to PiCloud."_

As I am not an advanced user of python, I find this sentence ambiguous : If I
want to use PIL or the GFX from swftools.org (I need pdf to png rendering and
image manipulation), they are written in C / C++. And I think they are Python
extensions ?

\- So can I upload them ?

\- Is there a list of installed python extensions ?

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kelkabany
Yes, on the configuration page you can upload an archive (or sync a repository
point) which contains a python extension build script.

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cellis
Nice. Currently using GAE...how do you plan to handle CDNs?

Also, should i want to migrate my data from Google's Datastore, how easy would
that be?

What do you have that GAE doesn't?

I'm asking on behalf of myself, mostly, but I imagine there are others here
deploying mission critical stuff on app engine.

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kingkilr
I'm not involved with them in any way, but their faq says that though their
product is amazon specific ATM if you want to work with rackspace or a private
install to contact them directly.

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brianobush
Looks nice, but I would rather have the processing power local to me. I have
used the python framework, octopy. It is a mapreduce framework for python.
Caveat: I have only used it for trivial problems thus far.

<http://code.google.com/p/octopy/>

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mbreese
Octopy looks far too simplistic for anything too large. For example, it pushes
the entire python source file to the client, including all of the data. It
then assigns a client data to process? I've been reading the code for a few
minutes and can't imagine using it for anything substantial...

I too prefer to have local processing, but there are times where I also like
to farm out jobs to a larger HPC cluster (I'm at a university with 2 large
clusters). The downside to this is that I usually have to wait in a job queue.

I guess what I really want is a hybrid approach where I can run jobs locally,
but if there are too many, spin up either a loadleveller / pbs job on a
university cluster or spin up a few EC2 instances.

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danielrhodes
If you're familiar with Python, this is essentially outsourcing the Processing
module.

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m0th87
Aa well as providing a transparent computing platform. This is a much better
alternative for my batch processing than keeping my laptop on overnight.

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shill
You would still need to keep your laptop on as you wait for your function call
to return.

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usaar333
PiCloud dev here.

You don't need to. As long as you save the returned job id (what is returned
by cloud.call and cloud.map), you can access its return value at any future
time - from any computer.

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shill
I stand corrected. Thank you. :)

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charlesju
SWEET site guys. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for providing
such a great service that I know many developers were looking for.

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henriklied
Looks very interesting! Is there a similar module available for doing
something like this locally?

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usaar333
The cloud package includes a module 'cloud.mp'
(<http://docs.picloud.com/client_adv.html#cloud-mp>) which allows the cloud
semantics to be used locally (using python's multiprocessing library).

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RK
Are you using boto on the backend?

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kelkabany
PiCloud dev here.

Nope, but we probably should.

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liuliu
How they scale automatically on python (a non-functional language)? I am
puzzled.

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m0th87
They probably spawn several python processes

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miloshh
Indeed, seems like a single cloud.call will not give you any parallelism, you
need many calls. So the whole parallelization challenge is left completely up
to you. Still, this is a nice approach, and I'd like to see more companies in
this space.

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willbmoss
Agreed, a very cool idea. I believe you are right on the parallelism front,
cloud.call just offloads the processing on their servers, but you'd have to
call it multiple times to get any parallelism.

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usaar333
PiCloud dev here.

That is correct. We also offer a mapping function, cloud.map(func, arg_list),
where every func(arg_list[i]) will be evaluated in parallel.

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enki
any beta code love?

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usaar333
PiCloud dev here.

Don't worry about the beta codes - you'll be approved in FIFO order.

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chaz_littlej
this is great. I've been playing around with a similar tool called Monkey
Analytics (www.monkeyanalytics.com), but they're still working out the kinks
with their parallelism

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mithunk
Why doesn't anyone like PHP?

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coconutrandom
how's that namespace working out for you?

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shill
Who needs namespaces when you have a 'quick reference'?

<http://php.net/quickref.php>

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louislouis
All programming languages should have a quick reference page exactly like
this. It would make learning and working with them so much easier.

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olliesaunders
A lot of them do, except you can't just call the functions, you usually have
to import the right thing and then instantiate the right object first. The
reason why this works so well is also one of the limitations of PHP.

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olliesaunders
Wait, so how do I get my cloud of pie? What flavors do you do?

