Yesterday afternoon, while relaxing in the garden I’ve suddenly realized why – in my mind – there was always a bit of hesitation to brand some of the emerging offerings as a true Cloud Computing. Amazon EC2 has always ticked the box. Why not the other providers? I knew the answer is going to be simple, but it took me quite a long time to figure it out.
Watching the sky where the strong winds were playing with the masses of condensed water vapor I’ve suddenly realized it’s not just a name these two phenomenas share together. It’s also volatility. Faithfully to their atmospheric cousins, compute clouds are definitely not representing static set of resources controlled by its users. Due to its nature where ‘perishable and intangible’ computing power is shared among multiple tenants to improve utilization rates, and therefore significantly reduce the cost, compute clouds are not just elastic but also indistinct, measured only by the mass of the resources currently allocated.
Having said that, I am obviously not suggesting Amazon EC2 resources are less resilient. Quite opposite. It’s simple a matter of the architecture where systems are designed for failure which at the end of the day will result in less failures affecting day-to-day business operations. Our personal experience might prove it, but nevertheless it’s always win-win situation if such a pattern is contained within the service itself. In this perspective I can see clear difference between Amazon EC2 and the other offerings. So until we’ll get more of the cloud nature, and less of re-branded VPS provisioning system, it’s going to be tough call.
Let’s try not to scale-in the IaaS resources or make them ever-so-resilient, approach more applicable within traditional infrastructure provisioning, but rather design our systems around this characteristic. And if you can’t get on with the indistinctive nature, try to have a look into a growing range of Platform as a service solutions. It’s a thin dividing line, I know, but the important one.
