I read the post below with interest, hoping that it would shed further light on the relative merits of private vs public clouds.

The Thing Private Clouds Can Do that Public Clouds Can’t | Cloud Computing Journal

Unfortunately, the main argument outlined was actually one of business process engineering, and the writer claimed that adopting the Private Cloud would highlight your inefficiencies and help you streamline your processes while the Public Cloud could not do this.

Sadly, there are numerous examples of companies adopting virtualisation technology (a precursor to the Private Cloud) that have still fallen foul of the same problem by not fixing their operational processes, leading to parts of their IT inventory being underutilised or not working as they should. This shows that the Private Cloud has no bearing on the improvement of operational efficiencies, and this looks like another case of leveraging the term “Cloud” in just because we can.

Having been a management consultant in the field of business process engineering, a company has to decide first if it wants to streamline/improve its processes: this is completely independent of the technology involved. I believe that the 3 Ps (People, Processes, Products – ie technology), considered in order, make a better company and not the other way around.

Later the author talks briefly about the impact of DDoS attacks on Public Clouds and that these attacks are hard to spot and difficult to resolve due to the large scale of the Public Cloud. I touched on this at the end of my recent post on hosting types, and agree that these types of attacks are harder to spot and take longer to fix in Public Clouds than Private Clouds simply due to the relative scale of the Public Cloud to the Private Cloud, but then if you added a thimble of water to a lake you’d probably not notice the difference, but if you added it to a glass you’d be able to spot the change more easily.

For a good insight into thoughts on Private Cloud, read Private Clouds: A Valuable Concept or Buzzword Bingo? and Why Cloud is at the Top of the CIO’s Priorities.

Related posts:

1. Cloud vs Traditional Hosting
2. Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers
3. What is Cloud Computing?

About 3 years ago, I posted an article about the different types of hosting available at the time. While most of what was written still holds true today, the emergence of Cloud Computing (Cloud Hosting) adds a new layer.

In this revision of the 2006 post I will add a summary of each of the types of hosting including Cloud to clarify the terms and help provide a clearer picture of the marketplace. This is very much an overview of the types of hosting and not an in-depth discussion of each; a hosting 101.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the starting point for most businesses. It offers a low-cost entry to market, but has pitfalls and usually offers little guarantee of reliability or support.

Cheap
Appears to offer a complete package
No sysadmin skills required
Multiple points of failure
Lack of support
Lack of control
Risk of poor performance

While many users of shared hosting report no problems with the service, there are many others who have experienced them. The principle source of issues comes from the fact that you are sharing the resources of a single server (ie a single computer like the one on your desktop) with many other users. This sharing also extends to email systems and both can be prone to abuse. Potential breaches or performance problems on websites outside of your control can take down the server and leave your website offline for prolonged periods. Also, since the IP address (the address of the computer on the Internet) is also shared, your email may eventually be considered as spam because somebody else on your server is sending spam (and both your email and theirs track back to the same IP address).

Virtual Private Servers

By using virtualisation, a single server can be partitioned into what appear to be multiple servers. This provides you with a private (or dedicated) space on the server, as well as a dedicated amount of resources – disk space, compute cycles, bandwidth, etc. This gives you more control and generally better performance but can still suffer from edge cases of shared hosting like the server being offline (although this is rarer as problems in another virtual private area are usually ring-fenced and prevented from leaking into your space by the virtualisation technology, but it can still happen).

More Control
More Reliable
Usually requires self-management, and therefore deeper sysadmin knowledge
Easier to break if you don’t have the skills, but this can be outsourced
Other virtual servers on your server may disrupt your service (e.g. bandwidth)
Single point of failure (it is still only one server)

Dedicated or Co-Location

With a dedicated server, you remove all of the third-party risks as the server is for you and you alone. You also usually get the option of defining an SLA with the data centre where the server is hosted to guarantee performance, so you also get better reliability. For example, with Rackspace (our company hosting partner) you get 100% network availability.

Complete Control
Guaranteed Reliability through SLAs
External data security risk mitigated through SLA
Corporate Governance risk mitigated through SLA
Expensive
Single point of failure
Sysadmin skills essential unless the server is under a managed contract

Clustered Servers (aka Private Cloud)

For larger enterprises, there is a need to ensure consistent performance and reliability. This is usually achieved through a set of clustered servers which share the load (load balancing) of the required performance. The content and applications are also mirrored across the cluster to ensure that performance is always maintained at an optimum level no matter what. This is more expensive but removes the single point of failure risk as, even if one of the servers breaks down, the rest of the servers keep running and delivering results of visits to the website or application.

Complete Control
Guaranteed Reliability through SLAs (if outsourced)
No Single point of failure
No external data security risk
Corporate Governance Assured
Expensive
Sysadmin skills essential unless the cluster is under a managed contract

With the adoption of Cloud terminology, the Private Cloud is essentially synonymous with Clustered Servers. It is simply an application of new jargon to existing infrastructures. Sadly, matters are further confused by everybody adopting the new jargon and applying it to associated tools and services – such as virtualisation. We have the marketing people to thank for that one!

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is simply an environment that uses aspects of both private and public cloud services to deliver the required service.

Public Cloud

See also Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers for some of the considerations companies need to make when deciding between Cloud or Dedicated servers. Public Cloud Hosting (see Cloud Computing for a description) is a large cluster of servers that provide all your hosting requirements in an elastic manner, scaling up and down as you need it in response to demand for your web applications or websites. It is generally paid for as a utility, meaning you only pay for what you use.

Less Expensive
Fully managed by a third party, meaning better reliability
No performance issues – it scales as needed
So large that external factors may affect your site and may take a long time to resolve (see below)
Difficult to assess external data risks and corporate governance issues

Because the public cloud is such a large virtual space, there can be huge volumes of websites and web applications operating within it. If one of these goes wrong and starts demanding lots of resources, the cloud will adapt to fulfil its needs. However, since the cloud is so large, this anomaly may not be detected for some time. There have been accounts of problems in Amazon’s ECC (elastic compute cloud), and others, where things like DDoS attacks have taken down large parts of the cloud. These issues are relevant to any type of hosting – and not just cloud – but in a public cloud, their detection and mitigation is often harder and longer to achieve because of the fluid nature of the environment. On the positive side, the cloud is more resilient to such attacks because it is fluid – a single server (shared or otherwise) would usually suffer immediately, although the resolution is easier to pinpoint.

Related posts:

1. Types of Hosting
2. Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers
3. Architecting Great Websites, Hosting

It’s been an interesting few months. After trying out a number of multi-computer synchronisation tools (like SugarSync, DropBox, etc) and settling on the Live Mesh beta, it’s time to rethink the approach because there still appear to be basic bugs with even Live Mesh that lead to uncertainty in the consistency of the synchronised files.

Here’s what I have experienced and what I am doing to mitigate things. It would be interesting to hear your experiences (using any similar products) so feel free to post below.

For the past couple of months, there has been a nagging doubt about Live Mesh. Occasionally, a few files were continually flagged as having a synchronisation conflicts – meaning Live Mesh thought that the file had been updated on two separate devices (computers) in between separate synchronisations. This meant that Live Mesh kept multiple copies of the files so that I could manually merge the changes and ensure I had the latest version. However, despite doing a manual merge, Live Mesh kept insisting that there was still a conflict even though I knew for definite that there was not.

This problem sewed the seeds of doubt about the thousands of other files I had under the watchful eye of the Mesh.

I also discovered that some files – particularly my website source code – was not always being synchronised and some websites were missing from different devices in my Mesh. Sadly, this meant that I could not depend on Live Mesh for day-to-day work. I understand that Live Mesh is still beta, so there will be teething problems, but Microsoft’s recent suggestion that the Live Mesh system is going to be more about “plumbing” rather than direct customer facing tools suggests that there may be a move away from what we currently experience in the beta.

So, what to do? Back to the beginning …

My ultimate goal is to be able to access my files wherever I am, and ensure I am working on the latest copy of the file. I have two principle types of files I work on – documents and websites – and while the basic need is the same, the way they are managed is better separated into version control for the websites, and simple access for documents. This means that I need a virtual disk in the Cloud for most of the documents – which I already had with Live Mesh, but was instead relying on the flawed synchronisation functions – and a hosted version control system.

Since we work with Rackspace at Emissary and Rackspace have a range of Cloud offerings, we asked if they had anything that could integrate desktop access directly with cloud storage (there was nothing that enabled this with Live Mesh). The original plan was to link my desktop with the existing cloud storage available to Emissary through our existing contracts with Rackspace, but they mentioned Jungledisk (which, incidentally, Rackspace purchased earlier in the year) and a couple of other systems, and so I did some further research.

Jungledisk hosts the files in the Rackspace Cloud, and while it is currently US-based there are plans to roll out global data centres over time (which will mean quicker access from anywhere on the planet). Our experience as a company with Rackspace has been exceptional and the pricing model for Jungledisk was good – several Gb of files meant about USD3 per month and backup was provided. I trust Rackspace more than I do Live Mesh and decided to move my files from one Cloud to another. It took a while copying everything across (and resolving the conflict and missing file issues that Live Mesh had introduced), but I now have a complete working library in the Cloud which I can access directly from any computer with Jungledisk installed, or via a web interface.

The downside is that even with high-speed Internet, some large files can be slow to access at first, but the built-in local caching of Jungledisk takes care of this and file access is the same as if the file were local once you access it a couple of times.

The next challenge was to find hosted version control for the website code. For this I looked at hosted subversion (or SVN). There are a number of hosted SVN providers, and there are some free tools (e.g. TortoiseSVN) which provide integration between local PC-based code libraries and Cloud-based SVN. At present, I haven’t settled on one complete solution, but am currently leaning towards migrating to the Zend Studio IDE (away from NuSphere phpED) as it has integrated SVN management and works on a Mac, plus Beanstalk as a hosted SVN (because it sits on top of the Rackspace Cloud). Hosted SVN also has the benefit of allowing easier management and sharing of code between a virtual team of developers by creating a central company repository without needing to physically port/merge files or set up VPNs.

(If you have any experiences or recommendations for hosted SVN and associated PHP IDE tools, please comment below. Thanks.)

So what of Live Mesh?

I am still using it to sync my music library peer-to-peer. The music library as a whole does not change often, so I feel it is relatively safe to commit to Live Mesh. It is also easy to check if albums are complete on each device!

The end result is a hybrid of different solutions to manage different types of files as there is not one tool to rule them all (at the moment).

Related posts:

1. Cloud Storage: On SugarSync, DropBox & Live Mesh
2. Conflict Resolution: Syncplicity vs Live Mesh
3. Live Mesh – Synchronising Folders

According to the latest research published on SEOmoz.org, the top 3 factors that affect your online search ranking factors are links. After that, traditional keyword optimisation becomes important. Here is the report:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

So why is it that many clients seem to be more focused on wanting traditional optimisation? Is it perception, (lack of) knowledge, or market conditioning?

What do you think?

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I saw the latest advert from British Gas this evening telling me that they had reduced prices.

That is good news for the consumer.

However, the method that they chose to deliver this message was packaged in successive images showing people switching everything on, having an extra cuppa, and basically using much more electricity just because it was cheaper.

Oh dear, British Gas. FAIL.

Hadn’t you noticed that the media and the government are telling us that climate change is happening and the over use of fossil fuels is killing the planet? And here you come suggesting we burn more fuel (and screw the planet further) just because you shaved a few points off the cost of our power.

I won’t be switching for sure.

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This little device looks fantastic. It may even convince me to buy an Xbox360 It’s not about the games, you see, but it’s about the way it helps interconnect the world around me.

More at Xbox.com | Project Natal

The ability to directly interact with my friends just by saying their name and seeing them on screen (no more phone numbers to remember while I’m at home) and talk to them over the Internet (no more phone bills) is a real plus. Also, the ability to share information in a “Minority Report” style manner just using hand gestures to look up things from a library is really cool. It does help that the (visionary) director behind the same movie is also influencial in Project Natal.

I can see this developing a long way and enabling the (multiple) parties in the conversation the ability to access things from the web as well as possibly run applications. Given that more applications can be accessed as a service from the Web, it won’t be long before an Xbox360 could become a centrepiece in corporate life for video conferencing and collaboration, and not just a home media hub.

The PS3 that I own has allowed me to connect my media world and, coupled with TVersity on my PC, has allowed me to stream my movies and music from my own library via WiFi direct to my TV. This has reduced the amount of space I need to keep physical DVDs (they can now be consigned to a box in storage). It also lets me watch TV directly using the PlayTV add-on, as well as record, pause and rewind live TV, and also record programmes for later viewing. As a media hub, the PS3 is second-to-none in this regard, plus it has a blu-ray player built in with forward-compatibility. (I understand that the Xbox360 now allows me to stream DivX content from my PC, so it is catching up).

However, Project Natal makes the Xbox360 a life hub which takes things to a whole new level. And that’s cool. The trailer for it shows a couple watching movies from Zune, and since direct downloads are going to replace DVD rentals in the near future, this is a move inthe right direction.

If I do take the plunge, I think I am going to need a bigger TV! And I’ll finally be able to play Halo 3. Only a couple of years late … ! Of course, that depends on when the release date appears on the horizon – Microsoft do not plan to rush this one: CNBC Natal won’t be rushed.

My next wish list item would then be a way to connect to my life hub remotely so that I can send it commands when I am away from home. One thing I’d like to be able to do with my PlayTV is to set a recording when I am out – for example when a friend mentions a programme I didn’t know was going to be on later, and know I am not going to be in to watch. It beats having to watch it online through iPlayer or 4oD on the PC. Or even better would be a true TV/movies on demand service that allows me to catch up in SD or HD when I want to. It will come, it’s just frustrating having to wait

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I was talking to a friend yesterday about this very topic – he asked me what it was – and then I read a post today on ZDnet that I thought was going to tell me the answer. Here’s the post: What’s Cloud Computing and What’s Not?

However, the post just told me there was a lot of debate about the issue and that a task force was working towards a definitive definition.

Not much use, so I thought I would add to the corpus of articles and definitions by publishing my (Emissary’s) definition of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is the technology used for the provision of web-based resources (i.e. storage, compute cycles and bandwidth) for web-based activities (e.g. content delivery) to a third-party without the third-party needing to understand how the resources are provided or needing to worry that there are enough. To use an analogy, the provision of the service of Cloud Computing is like the provision of electricity – it is a utility in the true sense – because the user of the electricity does not worry how it is generated and is able to consume as much or as little as they need for their purposes. Cloud Computing, like electricity, is then billed in accordance with how much is used.

Because this is a relatively new term, it is often applied to everything and anything so that companies can sound like they are at the cutting edge of technology. The most commonly associated utility with Cloud Computing is Software as a Service (SaaS). In general, this is provided on a licensed basis which is usually calculated on a per-user, or per-client basis. While it is a utility, unless it is delivered from a fully-scalable, black-box server infrastructure that meets the definition of Cloud Computing as set out above then it is simply SaaS. Another service commonly associated with the Cloud is virtualisation technology because it provides a black-box service to the end-user. However, unless it scales and provides the flexibility that a true Cloud should, it is simply a means to abstract technology knowledge from the end-user.

The reason that it is easy to blur the line between technology such as SaaS or virtualisation and Cloud Computing is that they originate in the same place – on a server somewhere out there on the Internet. By the same token that a kettle or toaster are not simply called “electricity” we should be clear that a program (e.g. website or virtualisation tool) running on a server infrastructure is not Cloud Computing, but may use it.

For further reading, please read my previous article Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers.

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• Big Pharma Exploring and Moving Data to the Cloud – IT Execs Talk about How It is Being Done (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
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• Akamai Edges Into the Cloud, Surveys State of the Internet (xconomy.com)
• White House Leading Cloud Computing Charge (elasticvapor.com)
• Sun’s new mantra: Call us the ‘cloud company’ (news.cnet.com)

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