[LINK] RFC: Cloud Computing

[George Bray]

Hi Roger, an excellent paper,  just a few notes:

Other technical benefits
   Speed of deployment - With the right skills, a service can be
deployed in a scalable, redundant way within a day.  Run your DEV,
TEST, STAGE and PRODUCTION tiers in the cloud, and switch off the ones
you don't need when the team goes home at night.


4. Technical Disbenefits

Not covered in this part is the issue that while the service provider
provides a platform for your service, you must currently customise
your application to suit the hosting environment.  Google uses the
giant, automatically scaling model but you have to use their [simpler]
database and there are some python programming things that need to be
changed. Python language only too still, I think.

On Amazon's model, your app will run as good as it does on your
workstation (hopefully better!), but the ECS service is sold in
"numbers of virtual PC servers".  So in this model you can use the
exact same tools as development, but you need effort in planning the
capacity, redundancy and expand/failover/fallback scenarios. But run
any language you want without mod.

Once you've done all this work to make your thing run on their
platform, if you want to change to a different platform you need to do
it all again.



Other random thoughts:

Then there's the legal elephant in the room.  IANAL, but, I think the
fact that the application and data may be in a different countries
from your own domicile brings up a quintillion problems when
considering what happens when Mr. USA calls wanting to discuss
"issues" with how the Free Trade Agreement is enforced for any data
residing on US soil.

IPv6 in the cloud?
Multicast?

George


PS - this world has probably changed since I looked into cloud
deployment about 5 months back.
No idea about MS Azure.  Barge pole material most likely.