From India to Intercloud. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Inter-Cloud. Infrastructure 2.0. Cloud Balancing, Cloud Bursting, and Intercloud. So once we have the intercloud, what are we going to do with it? Some debate is heating up, at least on Twitter, about a variety of cloud-related topics. As James Urquhart pointed out in his “Three debates that will benefit cloud computing” debate is good, because it fuels innovation and drives markets forward. One of the things that’s frustrating about new technology and concepts is that terminology often confuses the discussion. We periodically still see discussions – and debates – around the definition of cloud computing, after all, so that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Intercloud is another one of those terms that is going to cause some contention because it sounds like a technology, but apparently it’s not. But because the intercloud is more of a set of capabilities it really doesn’t do anything.
There are a couple of things that spring to mind; specifically cloud balancing and its closely related cousin, cloud bursting. But load balancing has not been, for quite some time, dumb. Strategy: Serve Pre-generated Static Files Instead Of Dynamic Pages. Pre-generating static files is an oldy but a goody, and as Thomas Brox Røst says, it's probably an underused strategy today. At one time this was the dominate technique for structuring a web site. Then the age of dynamic web sites arrived and we spent all our time worrying how to make the database faster and add more caching to recover the speed we had lost in the transition from static to dynamic. Static files have the advantage of being very fast to serve.
Read from disk and display. Simple and fast. Especially when caching proxies are used. Eventseer.net was experiencing performance problems as search engines crawled their 600K dynamic pages. The article does a good job explaining what they did, so I won't regurgitate it all here, but I will cover the highlights and comment on some additional potential features and alternate implementations...They estimated it would take 7 days on single server to generate the initial 600K pages. I like their approach a lot. Cloudbursting - Hybrid Application Hosting. I get to meet with lots of developers and system architects as part of my job. Talking to them about cloud computing and about the Amazon Web Services is both challenging and rewarding. Cloud computing as a concept is still relatively new. When I explain what it is and what it enables, I can almost literally see the light bulbs lighting up in people's heads as they understand cloud computing and our services, and what they can do with them.
A typical audience contains a nice mix of wild-eyed enthusiasts and more conservative skeptics. The enthusiasts are ready to jump in to cloud computing with both feet, and start to make plans to move corporate assets and processes to the cloud as soon as possible. The details vary, but a pattern is starting to emerge. After watching (sometimes in real time in the course of a meeting) this negotiation and ultimate compromise take place time and time again in the last few months, I decided to invent a new word to describe what they are doing. -- Jeff;
CloudBursting: A Hybrid Approach to the Cloud « Data Center Knowledge. How can businesses leverage the cloud without losing the comfort and control of in-house data center operations? Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr says many companies are following a middle path that combines the best of both worlds. Jeff has coined a term for this hybrid approach: cloudbursting. Jeff defines cloudbursting as “an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.” Here’s his description of how it works: A pattern is starting to emerge. This hybrid approach may not slow the interest in private clouds that employ cloud computing concepts to run apps more efficiently in corporate data centers, but it will raise awareness of different ways to manage the risks and rewards presented by third-party clouds.