As fluffy as a Cloud
21 04 2008
I love cloud services (and I am not talking about social networking) like Google Apps and Amazon Web Services because they simplify maintenance of services you'd otherwise have to deploy and maintain yourself.
Take Google Apps for example; it offers email, a calendar and office productivity apps. Email is of great importance to me as it is my lifeline to communication on the internet. I have run my own mail server in the past, but whenever it would go down (due to my host's maintenance schedule or an outage) I would potentially miss some emails. Delegating this service to Google Apps means that I can be sure that my email (using my own domain) is always up. Sure, the other apps that Google offers are useful but email is the primary reason I have Google Apps.
I have only recently signed up for the Amazon S3 service. It provides me with very cheap storage that I use as a personal (& secure) "web disk," as well as a mirror site for images I'll be posting on my blog. I had previously setup a WebDAV over HTTPS storage solution on one of my VPS servers, but this is susceptible to downtime and data loss as it is reliant on my hosting provider. The only catch to Amazon S3 is that you need to keep a close eye on it's usage in case you get slashdotted or something: you pay in unit amounts (at very cheap rates, but it all adds up) for bandwidth, http requests and storage (of course).
This blog, however, is hosted on one of my VPS servers. Why? Because it gives me very granular control over it's appearance and operation. I do not mind if it goes down, as it is not a business critical application and is regularly backed up to my Amazon S3 account.
The one cloud service I'd like to see is DNS Server hosting which offers as much flexibility as hosting your own server. I currently have two DNS servers (one as primary and the other as secondary) on two separate VPS servers. Whilst there is a level of redundancy, there is additional administrative overhead and is still vulnerable to downtime. Considering all my services need DNS (to resolve domains to their actual location), it is pretty important.
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Take Google Apps for example; it offers email, a calendar and office productivity apps. Email is of great importance to me as it is my lifeline to communication on the internet. I have run my own mail server in the past, but whenever it would go down (due to my host's maintenance schedule or an outage) I would potentially miss some emails. Delegating this service to Google Apps means that I can be sure that my email (using my own domain) is always up. Sure, the other apps that Google offers are useful but email is the primary reason I have Google Apps.
I have only recently signed up for the Amazon S3 service. It provides me with very cheap storage that I use as a personal (& secure) "web disk," as well as a mirror site for images I'll be posting on my blog. I had previously setup a WebDAV over HTTPS storage solution on one of my VPS servers, but this is susceptible to downtime and data loss as it is reliant on my hosting provider. The only catch to Amazon S3 is that you need to keep a close eye on it's usage in case you get slashdotted or something: you pay in unit amounts (at very cheap rates, but it all adds up) for bandwidth, http requests and storage (of course).
This blog, however, is hosted on one of my VPS servers. Why? Because it gives me very granular control over it's appearance and operation. I do not mind if it goes down, as it is not a business critical application and is regularly backed up to my Amazon S3 account.
The one cloud service I'd like to see is DNS Server hosting which offers as much flexibility as hosting your own server. I currently have two DNS servers (one as primary and the other as secondary) on two separate VPS servers. Whilst there is a level of redundancy, there is additional administrative overhead and is still vulnerable to downtime. Considering all my services need DNS (to resolve domains to their actual location), it is pretty important.
Categories : Internet
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