Amazon, MS, Google Clouds Flop In Stress Tests 154
Eponymous writes "A seven month study by academics at the University of New South Wales has found that the response times of cloud compute services of Amazon, Google and Microsoft can vary by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day services are accessed. One of the lead researchers behind the stress tests reports that Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud services have limitations in terms of data processing windows, response times and a lack of monitoring and reporting tools."
First! (Score:3, Funny)
Cloud free and lightning fast!
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Somehow, when I read "cloud computing" I always think of that scene from "Luniz - I got 5 on it", where they pass out because of the smoke inside their car, but with a large geek in a basement. And veeeery sloooowly...
Maybe we should foster that association. ^^
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IMO the entire cloud thing is nothing more than a hype. Noone ever got asked if he wanted to have all apps running as webservices. Google, MS and others just race each other without really having a look whether the customers will buy. And i don't even want to think of the bad choice of standards they base their services on...
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Sure there is..
Vow to never touch that sheep again!
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Confusing terms (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing two definitions of "cloud".
One is the idea of putting everything into a webservice. The other is the idea of utility computing. They often overlap, but plenty of web services run their own datacenters, and there are plenty of applications of utility computing beyond web services.
Specifically, your "scalability issues" are relevant to the "utility computing" part, but not so much to the "web services" part -- unless you were bringing up issues completely irrelevant to this article.
This is my main annoyance with the use of the word "cloud" -- even people with some technical knowledge still get fooled into thinking one kind of "cloud" has anything at all to do with another type of cloud.
what the fuck is services engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science told iTnews she was excited by Cloud Computing as it could potentially enable organisations to "outsource a certain amount of their risks and costs and tap into new economies of scale."
Sounds more like she has a degree in buzzword engineering.
Re:what the fuck is services engineering? (Score:4, Informative)
Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science told iTnews she was excited by Cloud Computing as it could potentially enable organisations to "outsource a certain amount of their risks and costs and tap into new economies of scale."
Sounds more like she has a degree in buzzword engineering.
From her homepage at UNSW [unsw.edu.au], it seems to be the creation and study of services but her focus seems to be on cloud computing with the "services" being concentrated on these subjects [smartservicescrc.com.au]. While a lot of her about page seems to be buzzwords and journal writing, I really wish they would release their "interoperable service software" and would be interested in seeing their final report for more specific metrics. Her blog doesn't say much about it [unsw.edu.au]. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt, she says in the article, "We saw a lot of hype and confusion, and decided to lead a team of researchers and actually get our hands dirty with this stuff." She also said:
Using Google AppEngine, none of your data processing tasks can last any longer than thirty seconds, or it throws an exception back at you. This is very consistent with the Google business model - they want to enable simple web applications to thrive on the Internet. AppEngine is there to enable the rapid development of simple web applications that don't include intense compute at the back end. - Anna Liu
Which I found interesting. Again, kind of hard to judge the merits behind this research without even a brief description of what the services were ... a singular value decomposition service? A return huge data sets from a database table service? A prime factorization service? A file intensive I/O service? I'm also curious as to what hoops one has to jump through to get those interoperable across all three systems ... after all Microsoft is just .NET, right? Is this rewriting something 3 times or making shared objects or what?
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I'm also curious as to what hoops one has to jump through to get those interoperable across all three systems ... after all Microsoft is just .NET, right? Is this rewriting something 3 times or making shared objects or what?
Well, Microsoft's Azure is in .NET, and Google's AppEngine is Python, but Amazon's EC2 is basically a virtual machine (you load your image in from S3, can be Linux or Windows). I would assume you could just write a common object in Python, have a IronPython hook to Azure, a plain Python hook to AppEngine, and a hook to whatever method you use to host your service in EC2 (like mod_python or whatever, if you're using Apache). This is if you intended interoperability from the start, however. Otherwise you'd pr
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Sorry, correction. Azure also supports other languages such as PHP, Ruby, and Python, according to their site.
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Well, Microsoft's Azure is in .NET, and Google's AppEngine is Python, but Amazon's EC2 is basically a virtual machine (you load your image in from S3, can be Linux or Windows). I would assume you could just write a common object in Python, have a IronPython hook to Azure, a plain Python hook to AppEngine, and a hook to whatever method you use to host your service in EC2 (like mod_python or whatever, if you're using Apache).
You could do that, but if your intent is to get as much processing power out of each
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Work for Microsoft in the past
From marketing buzzwords to grant buzzwords.
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Wave? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wave? (Score:4, Interesting)
The challenges for Wave don't rely on nearly the same challenges. Wave involves ONLY data transfer, not processing, storage, etc.. It's a protocol.
Making the comparison you've made is the same thing as saying HTTP is flawed becouse Joes Web Shack servers are slow.
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Sounds totally pointless to me...
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........
Wow...
Just..
Wow..
Yep, wave totally processing images, just like the web server your connecting to totally processes the images on this screen each time, custom, to fit your screen.. It's utterly amazing that the servers don't simply explode..
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Jabber has typing notifications. Google Talk manages to support it... (and yes, it works across servers of course)
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It's you who uses established term (typing notification) for something completely different (since this is Slashdot, you could say "unix talk-like")
And generally - pardon me for not basing my expectations on some belief. You could otoh remember that, say, such things are technically doable, Jabber is already not a light protocol/has a lot of "chatter"/many services other than pure IM use it successfully & Google has quite some pipes/serverfarm/demonstrated similar capabilities (Gmail is quite network ch
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Do you know what I'm talking about? Did you see the Wave demo video? It's *real time typing* - not just a notification like "dude is typing...", it's ACTUAL typing showing on your screen as it happens.
You mean, like in the old school Unix talk program from 20 years or more ago?
Real time as you write has never been much of a problem, but doing it with more than one person at a time is a bear in terms of user interfaces. Whole message-oriented chatrooms work better for many-to-many live discussion, and even they can get confusing.
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Even accounting for protocol bloat, it's not hard to imagine this scaling on Jabber. A fast typist can enter about 70 words per minute, but given the latencies involved I would tweak the transmission so that it only sent either every second or every word and then have the receiver add these to the UI with a fraction of a second delay between each character so it looked live. Assuming about 100 bytes for each XMPP message (varies depending on username and extra child elements on), we end up with the server
Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what exactly does "cloud computing" bring to the table for me?
Not much as far as I can see, other than a new crop of buzzwords.
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Well, for me, it is for low cost hosting for Django Applications, but for business it can be really interesting as there is somebody taking care of the infrastructure while they only need to care about the application itself.
So what exactly is supposed to be new about that? There have been companies providing exactly such services as that for decades.
Yeah, but... (Score:2, Troll)
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Really? I see traffic rising on my site. I have 6 servers up and running. I need 6 new servers to come up within the next 10 minutes to service my estimated needs for the next hour.
Wow, access rate is going up faster than expected. I need 6 more servers.
Phew. That was over. I just need 6 in total now. Why am I paying for 18? I'd like to take those down, please.
So, tell me.. who has been providing this service for decades?
-Laxitive
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Especially given App Engine, if I recall, does all of this for you.
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So what exactly is supposed to be new about that? There have been companies providing exactly such services as that for decades.
Indeed. Most people miss the point of these services, which is that you can turn capacity on and off, and only pay for what you use. Imagine, for a moment, that you run a vaguely popular web site. Most of the time it copes well enough with a single server, but every so often it grinds to a halt as more users hit it for some reason or another (e.g. you get slashdotted). With a s
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Cloud computing has the benefit that when you need to expand your server park's capacity, you don't have to wait for several weeks for the hardware vendor to deliver the hardware. Instead you outsource that job to the cloud vendor. You can more quickly respond to both increase and decrease in traffic. During peak hours you can spawn a few more servers and at night you can shut down a few without having to worry about the physical hardware and their associated maintenance burden.
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CDW usually takes 1-3 days to deliver a server. they ship the same day if you email the PO by 3pm.
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How does 1-3 days beat launching a node in 5-15 minutes?
Because for any sufficient volume of processing you're going to be spending many times more using these cloud services than running your own server.
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And running your own server means keeping an admin guy on staff. It's no more stupid than throwing your box into a colo and having it managed by colo admins or purchasing a virt from a webhost. If you're running a small business, its stupid to host your own these days. A large business has the benefit of economies of scale--small businesses do not.
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Cloud computing must work terribly, which explains why services like Amazon EC2 are totally going out of business, making no money and have no customers.
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I think EC2 was wrongly included in this study. Its a different breed of animal that "services on the web" like the google and microsoft stuff.
In my experience, its also pretty reliable and extremely useful.
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they give you 250 servers already replicated and working in one day, using the replication fairy?
Yes, they do - that's why they're special. Maybe you're using some new definition of cloud that isn't what I'm thinking of, but they do this by making you engineer your software as basically read-only. Any outputs go to another (equally scaleable) output service.
They aren't sitting there replicating a full OS install to a dedicated server. They're running the same read-only software image and executing it from an extra 250 virtual servers.
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During peak hours you can spawn a few more servers and at night you can shut down a few without having to worry about the physical hardware and their associated maintenance burden.
Right, but what does it cost, because guess what, just about everybody else wants more servers at peak hours and wants to shut down a few at night. What does the "cloud" service provider do with all of those servers when nobody wants them? How do they cover their maintenance costs for the time when their servers are idle?
That's right, by charging more for them when you want to use them. The big problem with the cloud concept is that it assumes that the need for servers is spread out evenly across the day a
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The fact of the matter is that it isn't, most businesses need/want more servers at the same time.
Do you have a citation for that? I would think that there would be a lot of different services which need servers at different times. Most business services would peak during the day, but I would think most consumer based services (entertainment, shopping) would peak in the evening. And then you have to consider that there are other countries in the world and their day is different than yours. So, their peak times would probably be different. I am not saying that cloud computing is the way to go, but t
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Do you have a citation for that? I would think that there would be a lot of different services which need servers at different times. Most business services would peak during the day, but I would think most consumer based services (entertainment, shopping) would peak in the evening. And then you have to consider that there are other countries in the world and their day is different than yours. So, their peak times would probably be different.
Absolutely, the problem is that the consumer services actually have a pretty high demand during the day, even though it peaks in the evening.
The problem with using cloud computing around the globe is that relying on servers that are in Japan to get business done in Europe or the U.S. puts one at significant risk of regular inability to access the servers due to communication disruption.
It's not that cloud computing serves no purpose, it's just that it is not the "world changing" idea that its proponents
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just about everybody else wants more servers at peak hours
The theory is that your peak hours won't be the same as everyone else's. A company that caters to businesses will have peak hours during the day, while one that caters to consumers will have them in the evening. Companies that do business in different time zones will have different peak hours too. If a suspended water vapour computing company has enough clients then the demand spikes should even out. They can help this by taking business from things like university research labs which have very processo
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There will always be a place for centralized computing services, but there will always be a need for distributed computing services as well.
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Google App Engine gives you enough resources to serve approximately 5 million users per month at no cost. See: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html [google.com]
Google will automatically scale up the number of instances of your application to handle any additional load. Beyond that, the pricing is extremely reasonable. See: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html [google.com]
The cool thing is that you're running on Google infrastructure. You don't need to worry about keeping 3 copies of your live data arou
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Oh, I thought we were talking about my business documents, not my web site. Sure, if I wanted to run apps in my website, I would consider Google apps.
Run apps in your website? You really have no idea what App Engine is. Google Apps != Google App Engine.
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Or, more accurately, that it assumes the need for servers is spread out more evenly among multiple customers than it is with only one. And that seems likely.
"Peak" hours have flopped back and forth over the years. I'd guess the PSTN first peaked during the day, as businesses opened. Later, as PBXes spread, maybe peak moved to residential callers at night. Meanwhile, data circu
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The point is that the cloud provider has so many customers, the cloud is so big that 10k simultaneous users are just a drop in a big bucket. Website A may have a sudden 10k increase in traffic, but website B and C are idle at this time and will see spikes at different times.
It's certainly more likely that a provider with 10k customers can maintain a larger data center than you ever can, unless you're Google.
You say that it scales badly and that the service is crappy. What makes it more likely that you can d
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What I don't seem to see mentioned anywhere is what happens when some event happens that causes everyone to go running to their computers to visit the latest fat "web 2.0" sites and suddenly 1000 or 10,000 different users are asking for massive additional capacity from the cloud?
That's why I'm developing "Storm Cloud 3.0 ®" technology.
It leverages the power of botnets and other online zombied PC's for a synergistic value added service for distributed computing.
Here at Storm Cloud 3.0 ® Central Ministry, our motto is: ;-)
"All your box belong to us"
You can trust us. Really!
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The provider is managing everything for you automatically, the Cloud service takes care of pretty much everything including security so it is manageable even for non-technical dudes.
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Saying cloud computing is "hosting for noobs" is like saying automatic transmissions are "transmissions for noobs." Sure, automatic transmissions are inherently less efficient than manual transmissions, but they save you from having to worry about shifting gears. Similarly, cloud computing might not perform as well as traditional hosting solutions, but they save you the hassle and expense of scaling up and down with demand. It's a trade-off, like everything else in life...
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> Saying cloud computing is "hosting for noobs" is like saying automatic transmissions are "transmissions for noobs."
To be fair, that's exactly what automatic transmissions are.
Cloud computing, on the other hand, doesn't just dumb everything down for the end user, but give a huge amount of flexibility in terms of how you can use it. I think one of the most useful aspects is painless scaling, which just isn't possible if you just keep the server in your closet. Of course it's not the solution to every pro
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially, it allows you to treat any net-connected computer as a dumb terminal with web services acting as your actual computer.
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Server clouds. When you access the web with your computer, you're accessing these sorts of servers already. Specifically, applications run in parallel in dozens of locations, potentially across the globe. Toss in anycasting, and the guy in Boston ends up connecting to a server in boston, and a guy in San Fransisco connects to one in LA, but they're both connecting to the same server as far as their concerned.
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For the home, however, I have a hard time imagining that it is more feasible to do your computing through the network rather than doing it locally. What about things like audio editors and games, that require latencies in the low milliseconds to be usable?
For businesses, there's a lot of things they do where latency is less critical and where the flexibility of a cloud is a good win. Not having to worry so much about scaling out physical server facilities is a really big win, as is the fact that clouds are damned easy to handle as a customer in accounting terms.
Of course, they have to worry about data security. But trust me on this, they have to worry about that anyway. Really. The cloud doesn't change that very much.
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Hosted Microsoft Exchange [microsoft.com] is a concrete example of a cloud (cloud-like) service that's been gaining ground for a while now.
Wired had a read-worthy piece on Azure's principal architect Ray Ozzie last year, Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Micro [wired.com]
Why is this rated "insightful"? (Score:2)
My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work...
Since you are not a candidate for Internet-connected, virtualized, on-demand scalable computing resources (aka "cloud computing"), you are not attracted to cloud computing's value proposition.
For those of us who need these things, vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are building services we definitely want to buy. Amazon's simple storage service, for example, had 40 billion objects [datacenterknowledge.com] in its repository as of February, 2009.
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It depends on your application. My application is a genetic algorithm. I want lots and lots of computers some of the time, and no computers some of the time. So, it's perfect for me.
I was recently at a Hadoop user's group. There were lots of people with applications that needed lots of compute time some of the time, and really don't need very much at all some of the time. There was a talk by a guy from Data Wrangling [datawrangling.com] where he's pulling in lots of data every night and doing some runs. He really should
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, what makes it a 'cloud' and not just a vanilla virtualisation platform is that your storage itself is then decoupled from your machine instances themselves, as well as the hardware, in an easy way without having to faff about with clustered storage set ups yourself or through a hosting company. This makes your machine instances easily disposable and allows for pretty easy recreation of production environments as a failover or for testing and development.
Essentially, that's what's attractive about it in layman's terms. It makes it far cheaper and far less hassle to get hardware and storage redundancy when you start having to worry about it, but large companies are not going to be outsourcing their critical stuff off site with it. That's just insane. It's just a pity the whole thing has become filled full of shit by people who don't know what they're talking about like that Services Engineering nutcase in the article who is probably being paid way too much money. The article doesn't even tell you what limitations they found in any detail.
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm developing a JRuby app for Google App Engine. I'm doing it because as a lone developer, I don't have to worry about anything but my code. I will never have to wake up to troubleshoot a network problem, OS issue, Apache oddity. I won't have to hire networking, DBA, or systems administration staff. And if my app hits off big, I won't have to re-engineer anything to make it scale. It will scale automatically.
I've played the role of network engineer, DBA, and sysadmin in the past. Now I can focus on my application.
That said, appengine is certainly not for all sorts of apps. It only supports a subset of SQL (no joins), I'm sure it won't meet the requirements for payment card processing or anything like that, and my APIs are limited. But for a good chunk of web apps, developing for the google cloud has huge advantages.
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As for why you might choose cloud over your
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Of course in practice it probably doesn't scale that seamlessly and you have to pay the host based on CPU / disk / database /whatever consumption but you get the idea.
Where did you get the idea that scalable is free? Resources cost. What's nice about the cloud is that (with well-designed apps on top) you scale almost linearly, especially in terms of cost. There's far less of a problem with non-linearities as you increase in scale (well, not until you're getting up to the size where it might be an idea to build your own server facility...)
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You obviously don't drink enough beer.
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The ability to use $10 million dollars worth of hardware for a month without spending $10 million dollars?
Let alone the fact that since, like you say hardware prices are constantly going down, you don't eat the 30% depreciation a year. Also, what good does your terabyte drive do you when it dies?
If you aren't looking for rapid scalability, saving money on huge capital investment, large amounts of CPU and data, then the Cloud might not be for you. It's stupid in the same way that buying millions of dollars
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If I want access to the web, I can get it, but that's only a few times a day when I need it.
I don't know about you but I need internet access 24/7.
Secondly, cloud computer is not for nerds.
Its for non-tech types who want to outsource things.
Actually "cloud computing" is a euphemism for "outsourcing".
Well I suppose its for nerds if you are the administrator of a "cloud" but for end users not so much.
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Cloud computing lets
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I call it Time Sharing 2.0. I'm young enough to have skipped those days, but old enough to have heard the war stories from the "old timers". Two years ago when I was sitting down to design our product I stuck with what I knew. We started by having our own in house server for development, but as soon as we moved to production I called up Pair Networks and got a couple managed dedicated servers. Why Pair? I've used them for big projects since 1999. They had always been reliable and their servers are man
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What does it give you?
It puts your IP in someone else's hands.
For safekeeping.
Kinda makes you feel all comfortable and warm inside, doesn't it?
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If you were highly mobile, working from multiple locations (or on the fly), the cloud would make sense.
I thought that was what laptops were for??
I'm Shocked! SHOCKED! (Score:2)
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Re:I'm Shocked! SHOCKED! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't help thinking this is just thin-client + mainframe again, and just like every other time the model has come around, it's being pushed as the future.
Indeed. But there is money to be made in that observation -- get in early on the next wave of "In-house dedicated hardware is the perfect answer to every problem!" Should be rolling in about two years after the cloud becomes mainstream and people realize it isn't the perfect answer to every problem. :)
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I can't help thinking this is just thin-client + mainframe again, and just like every other time the model has come around, it's being pushed as the future.
The thing is, it's good for some things (e.g., plain old web pages) and the thin-client model is much easier when it comes to deployment. If only there weren't idiots about who insist on using it for everything; some stuff just works better with thick clients or standalone.
Re:I'm Shocked! SHOCKED! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really see how this is similar to the cloud at all.
o NO! (Score:3, Funny)
I foresee a unplanned and totally random 'Software Audit' at the University of New South Wales in the near future!!!
No Tools? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google AppEngine has data reporting to a ridiculous level. This article doesn't even publish any REAL data.
I really HATE commercicles, small articles which make a claim, and then say, 'stay tuned!'.
Someone fire the author. The last paragraph reads:
"Liu will present the findings and offer developers advice on how to build robust applications to withstand the cloud's limitations at the Australian Architecture Forum in Sydney on Monday, August 24."
Wow, I at least they admit that this article has no REAL data in it, and THAT data will be released on Monday.
Apple has its response time issues, too (Score:3, Informative)
I only have 5 Apple .mac/.me accounts and even Apple knows that the rollout was so flawed that they gave us extra time on our contracts for the deficiencies.
Apple is getting better, but ISPs are choking upload speeds (even my business account that I pay $200/Mo for 6 megabits up and down) shows far slower data rates up over down to/from Apple.
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You bring up another very real problem with "cloud" computing. Somebody is going to have to pay for all that data to be shuffled between your terminal and the app server.
AppLogic? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, I'm wondering if the article was generated by some sort of AI in an attempt to take the human costs out of blogging. Google's cloud product is, in fact, called App Engine.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think this has the highest likelihood of being the culprit. Perhaps not google and amazon doing the traffic shaping, perhaps not even their own ISP doing it purposely. But it's not a news flash that doing anything over the internet can have wildly different latency and bandwidth re
Good place to start (Score:2)
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And if "time of day" creates biggest issues, that's actually fairly good news, to some degree (when pipes with the outside world are good, for starters...), for those from some small country in totally different timezone?...
Talking of handling load conditions ... (Score:2)
Age Before Beauty (Score:3, Informative)
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You may be right, but linking to thedailywtf for anything informative? You've got to be kidding.
Single Point of Failure (Score:2, Informative)
In a standard site infrastructure model if your mail server takes a dump, yeah, you're not getting mail. Same with routers, power, etc. We all get that.
Now introduce clouds for your services and add in firewalls, physical broadband pipes (T1, or whatever), broadband service provider and all their hardware/personel/
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Why would a cloud computing service provider such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon be hostile to you? Cloud computing is not the same as SETI or Folding@Home, it's run in professional data centres.
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Maybe because your "Cloud" running at Amazon/Google/Microsoft competes with one of their other online services?
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Small suggest, next time, read the article before you comment. Your comment has *0*% bearing on what this is talking about.
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Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said.
Ok, so give me a friggin' number! Did it go from 1 min to 20 minutes? Or from 1 sec to 20 sec. Or 1 hr to 20 hrs? When did you experience these response times? Give me a graph showing the response time as function of time of day and day of week.
I am learning to hate articles that give you a little bit of inform
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I am learning to hate articles that give you a little bit of information and leave out the important data. If Ms. Liu hasn't released the data, then the article should not have been written. Or she should provide it on her web page. Or provide a link to some journal where it's being published. This whole thing stinks of spin and MS FUD.
The article is essentially an abstract for the real data that will be presented on August 24th at the Australian Architecture Forum. It's not their fault someone submitted it to Slashdot prematurely.
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But that's one whole (incredibly obvious) problem with "cloud computing" and the like. As soon as you outsource to a remote site (especially one that is in some way shared) then you're at the whim of other traffic and can be slowed down at any moment.
Why is this news?
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Yeah, this info might be useful for Australians.
It suggests there should be some (more) cloud servers in Oz.