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That makes sense, and I agree, but this seems orthogonal to cloud vs non-cloud. If there were two cloud providers in different cities, and they allowed you to b

by jshen 14y ago

That makes sense, and I agree, but this seems orthogonal to cloud vs non-cloud. If there were two cloud providers in different cities, and they allowed you to buy a good link, then the cloud meets this need too.

msandford 14y ago
Yes and no. They won't let me put a link in and have the cross-connect plug directly into MY switch(es) because a core tenent of "the cloud" is "we reserve the right to move your instance whenever we'd like to" which is anathema to the idea of me controlling my machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc. The idea of the cloud is that "I just need a box that's SOMEHOW connected to the internet and I don't really care about the details of how precisely" which is fine for a great many use cases. But there are plenty of use cases where the above assumption does not hold. When it does not hold, using the cloud isn't the no-brainer idea that the author of the article makes it out to be.
- jshen 14y ago
  Here at Disney we both control our machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc; and we use CloudStack for an internal cloud. I think your idea of "the cloud" is narrower than mine.
  - msandford 14y ago
    Yeah that's entirely possible. If you're involved in building or maintaining Disney's internal cloud you have a lot more information about how it works than some folks on the other coast who don't have the right phone numbers or email addresses to really figure out how things work. You can -- because you control the internal cloud -- set certain instances up on physical machines such that you have all the redundancy that you need. But "the cloud" as the author describes isn't a thing that you can peer into and determine it's inner workings, it's more of a black box that you can run an instance on. AWS, Rackspace Cloud and all the folks who sell VM instances don't publish all the data necessary or give you "hooks" into the network infrastructure where you'd need to really make a reliable system. That's the whole point of the cloud. I pay you a very small amount of money for a VM that I rent by the hour and I don't WANT to know the details. Once you start learning (or having opinions) about the underlying network topology and everything else you're not "cloud" anymore, you're something else. What's the right name for it? I don't really know. But I would argue that it's not "cloud"

by jshen 14y ago

msandford 14y ago

Yes and no. They won't let me put a link in and have the cross-connect plug directly into MY switch(es) because a core tenent of "the cloud" is "we reserve the right to move your instance whenever we'd like to" which is anathema to the idea of me controlling my machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc. The idea of the cloud is that "I just need a box that's SOMEHOW connected to the internet and I don't really care about the details of how precisely" which is fine for a great many use cases. But there are plenty of use cases where the above assumption does not hold. When it does not hold, using the cloud isn't the no-brainer idea that the author of the article makes it out to be.

jshen 14y ago
Here at Disney we both control our machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc; and we use CloudStack for an internal cloud. I think your idea of "the cloud" is narrower than mine.
- msandford 14y ago
  Yeah that's entirely possible. If you're involved in building or maintaining Disney's internal cloud you have a lot more information about how it works than some folks on the other coast who don't have the right phone numbers or email addresses to really figure out how things work. You can -- because you control the internal cloud -- set certain instances up on physical machines such that you have all the redundancy that you need. But "the cloud" as the author describes isn't a thing that you can peer into and determine it's inner workings, it's more of a black box that you can run an instance on. AWS, Rackspace Cloud and all the folks who sell VM instances don't publish all the data necessary or give you "hooks" into the network infrastructure where you'd need to really make a reliable system. That's the whole point of the cloud. I pay you a very small amount of money for a VM that I rent by the hour and I don't WANT to know the details. Once you start learning (or having opinions) about the underlying network topology and everything else you're not "cloud" anymore, you're something else. What's the right name for it? I don't really know. But I would argue that it's not "cloud"