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July 14, 2008
It Takes More than Virtualization to Build a Cloud
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As the IT world struggles for nicely packaged definition of cloud computing, marketing personnel who wish to leverage its buzz are engaged in their own struggle. First, they need to determine which, if any, of their offerings can arguably be considered cloud computing under any of the various working definitions currently populating the market. If the connection is attenuated, the question becomes whether to shoehorn their solution into that definition or whether to lay off for the time being and suggest the company start implementing features that will make for a better fit.
This decision is not easy. Jumping on a blazing hot bandwagon could be a ticket to overnight success, but latching onto an unproven fad could be fatal. And what about that struggle for a universal definition? Is stretching the boundaries to include your offering detrimental in that it adds further confusion to the mix, or is there plenty of room for everyone who wants to frolic up in the clouds?
Companies with roots in the traditional managed hosting field are having to address this issue more and more as virtualization establishes itself in their offerings. As it turns out, their reasons for leveraging or not leveraging the cloud buzz are just as varied as the definitions with which they are working.
“We are cloud computing”
The cloud computing landscape is changing so fast that after an early-Spring blog delineating between his company’s offering and cloud computing offerings, GoGrid Technology Evangelist Michael Sheehan concluded that the two simply were not one in the same. Fast-forward a few months to late June, and Sheehan has changed his tune -- perhaps with a little goading from President and Co-Founder John Keagy, who believes that, given the breadth of definitions out there, “for us to say that GoGrid is not cloud computing is just silly.”
One of the definitions from which Keagy draws his unequivocal determination comes from Forrester Research, which has included an underlying “grid engine” architecture as one element of a cloud. As its name might imply, GoGrid, a division of dedicated Web-hosting provider ServePath, utilizes a virtualized grid architecture to instantly deliver VMs to customers. “Grids are reincarnated in a new form, and it’s called ‘cloud computing,’” says Keagy. Sheehan concurs, adding that not only is GoGrid built using a grid architecture, but all other clouds are, as well.
Additionally, Sheehan has devised a pyramid diagram of the cloud marketplace, with the base level being infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Allowing users to launch and provision VMs with only a credit card, GoGrid provides a service that, essentially, is the same as EC2. To hear Keagy tell it, no one would deny that EC2 is a cloud, and because GoGrid is the only alternative to EC2, it, too, must be a cloud.
Taking it a step further, the folks at GoGrid actually believe their product is more true to cloud computing’s notions of openness, simplicity and flexibility than is EC2. In terms of simplicity, Sheehan says GoGrid is all about making cloud computing “less nebulous and [more] tangible to the end-user.” Whereas Amazon has an 18-minute video instructing EC2 greenhorns on how to get started, he says a Go-Grid first-timer can be up and running in five minutes using the company’s almost-too-easy GUI. (Ed. Note: He’s not lying -- at least in terms of provisioning a few machines and adding a load balancer and a database.)
In terms of flexibility, Keagy believes GoGrid’s hardware virtualization model gives users far more options than does EC2. For one, it gives users as close to a bare-metal experience as possible, even providing console access as if you are working on a dedicated Windows, Linux or Debian server, giving users, for all intents and purposes, as much control as an “old-school environment. In fact, says Keagy, a user could load software from his desktop DVD drive onto a GoGrid machine if he was so inclined.
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