Marco Tabini has a great post discussing the cost of the cloud, and the current state of affairs. He calls for a simpler cloud platform, not just in terms of cost, but ease of use and products and services that adapt to changes in the market. Though the $100/month Mosso offering is mentioned (this site is hosted on Mosso), I would like to point out the recent acquisitions by Rackspace/Mosso that make their cloud offerings even more compelling than AWS for me.

• Slicehost : Rackspace announced the acquisition in late 2008. This allows me to spin up virtual instances or Slicehost’s version of AMI’s called Slices (this was updated due to Ian’s comment below. You cannot migrate an AMI from EC2 to …

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database - so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out - they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka …

If you want to learn about Tungsten Replicator first hand, I'll be doing a presentation at the February 2nd MySQL Meet-up in San Francisco. With luck I'll be able to demo not only the replicator but also some cool Amazon/RightScale integration we will be introducing in February. Teaser: It's possible to set up database clusters faster in Amazon than on a laptop.

Advance thanks to Mike Tougeron and Rich Nigra for the invite. For people suffering from obsessive curiosity about MySQL replication or database clustering in general, this talk is for you. Hope to see lots of you at the meet-up.

In high school, I had a great programmable calculator. I’d program it to solve complicated math and science problems “automatically” for me. Most of my teachers got upset if they found out, but I’ll always remember one especially enlightened teacher who didn’t. He said something to the effect of “Hey, if you managed to write software to solve the equation, you must thoroughly understand the problem. Way to go!”.

George Reese wrote up a blog post over at O’Reilly the other day called On Why I Don’t Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud. His main argument seems to be that auto-scaling is bad and reflects poor capacity planning. In the comments, he specifically calls SmugMug out, saying we’re “using auto-scaling as a crutch for poor or non-existent capacity planning”.

George is like one of those math teachers who …

Just a quick update, I was invited to speak at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West (how’s that for a mouthful?) and accepted, planning on talking about SkyNet, S3, and our future use of cloud computing. Alas, my Inbox is so crazy, I failed to see the handful of emails the conference sent me asking me to sign a contract of some type. So I missed the deadline and they canceled my spot. (BTW, I can’t recall a conference ever asking me to sign something to speak, but this one does and I was full of FAIL.)

So, I’m sorry, despite being listed on the program, I’m *not* speaking there this week. It was my bad – I just missed the emails (as I miss so many emails these days). But still, a phone call from them wouldn’t have hurt, would it?

Who knows if I’ll be on …

For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.

While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.

Amazon also announced a service level …

I took part in a webinar on cloud computing today, including some of the top names in cloud computing services. As Pythian has some MySQL clients using cloud computing, I was particularly interested…

I was interested by the many levels of what cloud computing means, including such categorizations as Facebook apps being a part of the cloud. I think many of us consider cloud computing to mean “virtual infrastructure as a service” and overlook some pretty robust cloud computing that’s already out there, such as “application components as a service” and “software [platform] as a service”.

Following are my notes:

“Our objective today is to cut through some of the noise associated with ‘cloud’ and get to a real world approach for getting some serious value from the cloud.”
…

A short post to direct people’s attention to and solicit comments on the following from someone who is admittedly a hero of mine, Richard Stallman:

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their …

Seriously kids, what’s with the lack of scalability? I’ve never seen CNN or the NYTimes go down on “trimmed” versions.

Is it a question of bandwidth? Is it lack of hardware?

Take for example, Malaysiakini (the first alternative news source in Malaysia, with a subscription model built around it). It runs FreeBSD, uses PostgreSQL, and has a CMS on top of it (so almost a LAMP stack right there). There’s even use of Squid for caching. Yet there’s lacking load balancing? This is where the cloud can come into play, when there’s high traffic.

Next up, …