Partly Cloudy, with a Very High Chance of FAIL

David Fetter's blog

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PostgreSQL Experts, Inc

Tuesday, April 6. 2010

Partly Cloudy, with a Very High Chance of FAIL

Everywhere you turn, it's "cloud" this, "cloud" that, "cloud" the other.
Public clouds, private clouds, hybrid
clouds, fluffy clouds...but somewhere in all that billowing haze,
there's an actual use case.

The people who designed cloud computing made certain explicit
trade-offs, some of which have been lost in all the hype. Given those
explicit trade-offs, your application is a candidate for "the cloud" in
general only if it has all of the following characteristics:

- Embarrassingly parallelizable
- Does not have bounded latency requirements
- Needs CPU much more than I/O
- Tolerant to partial data loss


It is a candidate for a "public cloud" (Amazon, etc.) if it has all of
the above, and

- All the data would be safe in the hands of your worst enemy.

The people who operate public clouds have no incentive and no
intention to guard your information, have "leaked" such information
many times so far (insofar as they can "leak" something they did not
attempt or promise to protect), and will continue to do so as long as
people put private information in them. It has no place there.

Based on the first list, we can eliminate:

- Relational database management systems
- Email
- Web servers

Based on the second list, we can also eliminate

- Anything where private data could ever go

What's left, you ask? Well, there's SETI, and Folding@Home, and there
will be other similar scientific projects.

But for your run-of-the-mill application? Not on your life!
Posted by
David Fetter
at 04:48 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)
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I disagree. While there are many things about public clouds that are less than ideal for running high throughput transactional applications, most business applications don't need 8+ spindles for its IO or 99.999% uptime. There is no technical reason that most websites, email systems, and reporting applications could not run in a public cloud. I see the issue more as a business one. It is just cheaper to go to your local hosting company and ask for a managed server than it is to pay Amazon $0.50/hour + storage space + data transfer fees +++.

That being said, I don't think most business are ready to move their production data to a public cloud and they may never be ready. I see the public cloud as a perfect development and testing platform. I've actually used it a bit to play with SR/HS in 9.0. I was able to spin up a few 8CPU instances (which we don't have those types of spare boxes laying around the data center) and start beating on the instances in a few minutes.
#1 Jim Mlodgenski (Homepage) on 2010-04-07 15:47 (Reply)
The comments are better than the article. He says ``I disagree'' but gradually seems to forget what he disagrees with as he sinks into a warm gooey tub of autistic techno-fappage.
#2 Faptor Jerkosovic on 2010-04-07 19:04 (Reply)
Databases and the applications that use them have become so diverse it's really hard to make generalizations. I know one marketing research firm that already hosts most of their applications including databases in the cloud--cost scaling and flexibility are more important than security and performance. We host our own company website and IT systems at Amazon. It cut our hosting expenses by about 90%. The cloud is also very convenient for testing as Jim says.

That said, for the most part companies running business-critical apps on conventional RDBMS are not running to deploy in the cloud. We backed off putting in explicit cloud support for our own database clustering products because there is no demand. For these sorts of users the cloud is just a bunch of hype.
#3 Robert Hodges (Homepage) on 2010-04-08 20:49 (Reply)
p.s., Most ISPs effectively use clouds for their base-level hosting offerings and have been doing so for years. Cloud in this case is a programmable ops environment based on hardware virtualization. If you sign up for the $10/month email and blog service at www.joes.blogomatic.net chances are good the apps are running in a cloud. However, while most large ISPs I know run the web server and mail service on a VM, they connect back to a shared DBMS server, typically MySQL. This kind of mixed model is another reason why it's very hard to generalize.
#3.1 Robert Hodges (Homepage) on 2010-04-08 21:00 (Reply)
(Comment removed)
#3.1.1 Faptor Jerkosovic on 2010-04-08 22:13
Congratulations, you win today's web politeness award. Thanks for playing.
#3.1.1.1 Robert Hodges (Homepage) on 2010-04-08 23:06 (Reply)
Sorry about that. He's off.
#3.1.1.1.1 David Fetter (Homepage) on 2010-04-09 02:26 (Reply)
Thanks Dave! Nice topic BTW.
#3.1.1.1.1.1 Robert Hodges (Homepage) on 2010-04-09 09:10 (Reply)
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#4 LisyBalsLaf (Homepage) on 2012-12-03 19:45 (Reply)
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