Cloud computing, it’s no secret that I don’t buy wholly into this idea mostly because everyone talking about it either a) doesn’t understand it or b) has forgotten that it’s an old paradigm that was tried a long time ago and failed for many reasons. Still as an IT professional who likes to stay current with emerging trends I’ve been researching the various cloud offerings to make sure I’m up to speed on them should a manager get the bright spark to try and use them in our environment. There’s also the flip side that my chosen specialisation vendor, VMware, has their own cloud product aimed at building your own internal cloud for hosting all your applications. Whilst I still sit on the sceptical fence about the cloud idea as a whole there are some fundamental underpinnings that I think I can make use of in my current endeavours. I might even stop feeling dirty every time I mention the cloud.
As any budding start up engineer will tell you one of the things that always plays on the back of your mind is how you’re going to scale your application out should it get popular. I’ve had a lot of experience with scaling corporate applications and so thought I’d have a decent handle on how to scale my application out. To give you an idea of how most corporate apps scale it’s usually along the lines of adding in additional servers in each tier to handle the data load and then load balancing across them (or in simple terms throwing more hardware at it). This works well when you’ve got buckets of money and your own data centre to play with but us lowly plebs trying to break out into the real world face similar problems of scalability without the capital to back us up.
Right now I host most of my stuff directly off my home connection on a single server box that I cobbled together for $300 some years ago. It’s done me well and is more than grunty enough to handle this web site but anything above that has seen it crumble under the pressure, sometimes spectacularly. When I was looking for hosting solutions for Lobaco I knew that shared hosting wasn’t going to cut it and getting a real server would cost far more than I was willing to pay at this early stage. In the end I found myself getting a Virtual Private Server from SoftSys Hosting for just under $600/year. At the time it was the perfect solution as it let me mirror my current test environment with the additional benefit of being backed up by a huge pipe and enterprise level hardware. It’s been so good that I’m even considering moving this blog up there, if for the only reason that it will mean it won’t go down again just because the net dropped at my place.
However my original ideas of scaling out the application don’t gel too well with the whole VPS idea. You see scaling out in that fashion would see me buying several of these each with the same price tag or higher. Just a simple load balanced web and database server farm would set me back $2400/year neglecting any other costs incurred to get it working. After looking at my various options I begrudgingly started looking at other solutions and that’s when I started to take cloud computing a little more seriously.
Whilst I’ve still only scratched the surface of most offerings the most compelling came in the form of Windows Azure. Apart from the fact that it’s Microsoft and should therefore be blindingly easy to use the fact that they provide free accounts (with discounted rates thereafter) to budding entrepreneurs like myself got me intrigued. A couple Google searches later showed that porting my WCF based services to the Azure platform shouldn’t prove to be too difficult and they provide in built loading balancing to boot. The pricing model is also attractive as it is on a unit basis, you only pay for what you actually use. Azure then could easily provide the required scalability without breaking the bank, leaving me to focus on the more pressing issues than whether or not it will work with a decent chunk of users.
Whilst I won’t be diving into the clouds just yet (the iPhone, she beckons) it’s now on the cards to port Lobaco across so that when it comes time to launch it I won’t have to watch my server like a hawk to make sure it isn’t dying a fiery death under the load. I don’t think the cloud will be the solution to all my scalability issues that might come up in the future but it’s looking more and more like a viable option that will enable me to build a robust service for a good number of users. Then once I’ve got my act together I can start planning out a real solution.
With blackjack, and hookers.
