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The problem is not that the cloud is not for you / others. The problem is that you chose the wrong kind of cloud platform for your app, and instead of choosing
by jkahn 14y ago
The problem is not that the cloud is not for you / others.
The problem is that you chose the wrong kind of cloud platform for your app, and instead of choosing the right kind, went right back to the early 2000's and rented some physical boxes instead. In doing so, you've flipped your pros and cons lists, but you haven't solved the actual problems.
Heroku is a PaaS cloud platform. Zero server awareness or maintenance. An app only environment.
You would have been better off using an IaaS cloud, where you have to rent instances and install apps, but you still have the benefit of instant, (potentially automated) scalability, intrinsic high availability and minimal maintenance.
Instead, you're renting physical servers which often have a long term commitment, can potentially drop off the air for any reason - such as drive failure, power supply failure - and then you'd have to rebuild.
I think the cloud almost certainly is for everyone, but you need to use the right kind of tool for the job.
- zeeg 14y agoThis is true, but Heroku is not the only provider of services like this, and some of the same limitations and costs exist throughout the ecosystem. I would disagree that renting physical machines is going back to the 2000s considering nearly every large company is doing this. Just because the trendy hipsters of the internet use the cloud, doesnt mean its modernizing things, and anyone not doing it is a dinosaur.
- jkahn 14y agoGoogle App Engine and others also offer similar PaaS offerings. Yes, they all have similar limitations (and benefits). Large companies I deal with don't rent physical machines, they buy them and then run a hypervisor platform across them to gain some of the availability benefits of an infrastructure cloud. It costs more, but you lower your risk profile. Many of these companies are looking at migrating their apps to a cloud platform (internal or external) to outsource the hardware / software / infrastructure maintenance. They are mostly interested in IaaS. Cloud is not just for Internet hipsters.