Cloud computing options and portability

I listened to Paul Miller's podcast with Rackspace's president of their Cloud Division Lew Moorman this morning. I mostly agree with his comments on easy portability between Rackspace cloud services and Amazon's EC2.

I have not yet used Rackspace's cloud offerings, so my comments here are based on their documentation and a conversation I had with one of their support engineers (for one of my steady customers: I declined some work tasks to move to Rackspace because I don't like to spread myself too thin: I spend a lot of effort staying up to speed on Amazon and AppEngine, so I prefer to specialize on those two deployment platforms). The advantage of Rackspace is the binding of a persistent disk volume with their virtualized server instances (really, they offer a standard sort of VPS hosting service) where with Amazon it takes a little extra work to manage EBS volumes separately. For me, I like the benefit of Amazon's SQS, S3, and Elastic MapReduce - that said, I would make a small bet that Rackspace will provide similar services, otherwise they will just be competing in the VPS business space, although with good support (that said, I have always received very good support from smaller hosting companies like RimuHosting).

Lew Moorman was critical of Google's AppEngine because it depends on very proprietary software (mostly their highly scalable non-relational datastore). A fair criticism, but if you really wanted to move off of AppEngine, there are migration paths like using DataNucleus JDO support for a relational database server or something massively scalable like HBase (from the Hadoop project). One big win for using AppEngine is that if you decide to build on top of the Wave platform, software agents at least for now need to be hosted on AppEngine, and this process is fairly simple.

Comments

  1. Erik Bengtson3:02 AM

    You can use DataNucleus JDO or JPA with Amazon S3.

    So, the migration path in relation to data management can be shortened.

    If Rackspace decides to offer Data Persistence services, DataNucleus will offer support to it as well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more