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."
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?
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.
Re:"Cloud" be bollox, dude. (Score:3, Informative)
Small suggest, next time, read the article before you comment. Your comment has *0*% bearing on what this is talking about.
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.
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.
Re:what the fuck is services engineering? (Score:3, Informative)
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 probably have to rewrite it at least once (since EC2 could run Python, or .NET/Mono).
Age Before Beauty (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cloud Computing? Why? (Score:3, Informative)
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
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/etc, and any other broadband service providers that host traffic to your destination (and their hardware/service/personel/etc). There's a host of things that are added that, if broken, sever your business's ability to perform. And we havent even gotten to the company that has the hardware and services that actually host the cloud.
The bottom line is the argument between what is more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately the accountants dont factor in downtime for every employee when things break. They only factor in the check they know with certainty that has to be written every month. Yeah, on paper you probably save a bunch of money to go with a cloud. In reality you're not making any money with all your employees sitting around with their thumbs in their asses a couple of times a week.