VMware: Hey, Other Cloud Services Exist 39
Nerval's Lobster writes "VMware has updated its cloud-management portfolio to support alternative tools, including Amazon's platform. That's a big step for the company, which for some time seemed to shy away from the idea of backing heterogeneous cloud environments. VMware's vFabric Application Director 5.0 is designed to, in the company's words, 'provision applications on any cloud.' That includes Amazon's EC2. The platform includes pre-approved operating system and middleware components for modeling and deploying those aforementioned applications, with the ability to use the platform's blueprints for deploying applications across 'multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures.' The other platform, vCloud Automation Center 5.1, enables 'policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services.'"
It's quite possible that this move is in response to Microsoft building similar functionality into Hyper-V 2012.
Re:Does anyone with a clue actually *use* this stu (Score:2, Informative)
Well, basically those "clouds" are just a cluster of servers running software which provides an interface where you can upload and run multiple VMs.
So for example if you want to run a website, you create a VM with the web server and data, upload it to the cloud service, and then have it run one or more instances to service HTTP requests depending on the traffic at the moment.
Re:Does anyone with a clue actually *use* this stu (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon's offerings are pretty good. And yeah, their persistent use of acronyms is a bit annoying and confusing. It's not so much buzzwords though, as an attempt at branding.
Firstly, if you're just mucking around, it can be cheap. Really cheap. If you're just working on a proof-of-concept, you can possible get a dedicated server for free, as Amazon's prices scale on use, and a test machine isn't going to get a lot of traffic.
Secondly, it can be really fast. Because Amazon's physical hardware is already geographically distributed, you can do the same pretty quickly. If I have a properly setup application, and I decide I want a server physically located in Asia to reduce the latency to customers there, I can have it done in 10 minutes.
Thirdly, its easy. It's got a steep learning curve, but once you're on top of it, backups, disaster recovery, scalability and a whole host of other problems are essentially solved for you.
Sure, there's nothing it can't do that a properly configured and tuned geographically-distributed redundant cluster of linux boxes couldn't, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, faster and easier than running such a cluster.
Re:Does anyone with a clue actually *use* this stu (Score:5, Informative)
That's the Infrastructure-as-a-service offers. Then there's platform-as-a-service (e.g. App Engine, Heroku) and Software-as-a-service (e.g. Google Docs).
Essentially, cloud means: we abstract and automate everything from this level down, so you don't have to worry about it and can focus on everything above.
And yes, "cloud" is a buzzword for something that already existed. That doesn't mean the concept is bad or useless.