Thanks for sharing. We are in the market for running cloud services. We have used EC2 in the past and have been featured on the AWS blog for some of the use cases of EC2 for one of the previous avatars of our service.

We understand the pain and I think a lot of the cloud deployment solution tools would be helpful. Its kind of like what Opsware/Loudcloud used to do for datacenters but for managing the cloud.

We are looking at the market place for our own service. StandingCloud based on your blog post is definitely one and cloudkick.com seems like another? Are you aware of similar solutions in the same area so that our evaluation becomes easier?

Nik

Normal people aren't using cloud computing APIs. They're simply installing an OS on the cloud just like they would with a physical server. In that sense, there is very little difference between the two (except the security and reliability of the hypervisor itself (I'm referring to Paravirtualization since that's the flavor of cloud being critiqued here)).

I think this conversation is on two different levels:

Brad/Michael saying that cloud computing (when leveraged with their APIs) has it's own problems and isn't a panacea.

Everybody else is basically saying that if you don't leverage the cloud (apples to apples) any more than you would a normal hardware installation, you get the added advantage of not having to worry about fixed hardware costs/maintenance and the lead time on deploying/retiring hardware. The savings here more than makes up for the increased cost of the cloud (usually).

Both arguments are correct. I'm going to post this on my blog at varud.com right now – it seems to be a hot topic.

*Part* of the aggregate cloud computing marketing push is the latest "let someone else solve your problems." Just like the ASPs of the 1990's said they'd run your server apps for you. Just like the custom built ASPs (like Salesforce.com) of this decade said not to worry about software anymore. Part of cloud computing's industry message is that you no longer have to worry about servers.

Want a new server? Click a button. There it is.

No one is telling you that you still have to install an OS. Or that you still have to make backups.

Brad's example is that the API implementations for controlling cloud computing suffer from the same problems that cloud computing is trying to remove.

This is a very real problem. Another way to think about it, based off Brad's description of their survey is that there are real concrete observed quality control issues across the board. You simply cannot pickup any API, implement in any programming language or other tool, and just expect it to work. You cannot assume that your only problems will be logic ones with your use of the API. You have to assume there will be all kinds of lower level ones.

One example from a previous startup I founded in 2004 that talked to 55 different blog platforms is that even a simple "standard" like the metaWeblogAPI can have weird issues across different implementations.

Case in point: when integrating with a Brazilian blog provider our code was causing total server core dumps. The cause? The provider claimed to use one character set and was actually not following *ANY* character set standard. They were just throwing characters in the air. At the time there was a major issue with the compiled-in support for XML-RPC in the version of PHP we were using such that it became very unhappy when it encountered this situation.

As in Brad's example, the solution was a custom native-language implementation of XML-RPC that although worked and provided more control was probably at least 10-100 times slower than the C language extension. The productivity gains on this stuff start to erode when you find yourself reimplementing every Internet RFC because no one ever managed to take the time to do it right.

This issue probably took up 2-4 man days of time debugging. We just did not expect the issue was at such a low level and caused by something seemingly innocuous as character sets.

In reality, we learned character set implementation is a big pain to debug because it is very hard to figure out what the raw characters being sent/recv'd are as every single layer of software can be fiddling with them, including your SSH terminal, your OS copy-paste, and your text editor. Our view that one or two systems programmers figured out character sets a long time ago and we would never have to understand them was wrong.

I am giving this long reply because it illustrates how many problems you still have to deal with if you are using cloud computing.

Guess what happens when you couple vm's in the sky with a 4GL system that handles this layer of stuff. When you can really make a decision to outsource every single piece of every single layer beneath your application logic to a company that will just make it work…

I think you're having an observational bias because you're getting these notices from the cloud provider instead of from the OS provider – but they're exactly the same.

I don't see any valid critiques of Cloud Computing here.

Valid critiques are:

1. Security leaks caused by malware at the hypervisor layer.
2. Performance bottlenecks caused by too much abstraction.
3. DoS attacks made possible through anybody sharing the hypervisor.

There's definitely an attack on Cloud Computing possible, it's just not in this post.

Disclosure: I love cloud computing and am done with server hardware.