You’ve heard all the buzz and spiel about the cloud, and there’re good reasons to want to get there. On-demand compute power makes new levels of scalability possible. Low up front costs means moving capital expenditure to operating expenditure and saving a bundle in the process. We won’t give you anymore of the rah rah marketing hoopla. You’ve heard enough of that. We’ll gently play devil’s advocate for a moment, and give you a few things to think about when deploying applications with a cloud provider. Our focus is mainly on Amazon EC2.
You might also be interested in a wide reaching introduction to deploying on Amazon EC2.
- Funky Performance
- Uncertain Reliability – A Loaded Gun
- Iffy Support
One of the biggest hurdles we see clients struggle with on Amazon EC2 is performance. This is rooted in the nature of shared resources. Computer servers, just like desktops rely on CPUs, Memory, Network and Disk. In the virtual datacenter, you can be given more than your fair share without you even knowing it. More bandwidth, more CPU, more disk? Who would complain? Well if your application behaves erratically, while you suddenly compete for disk resources you’ll quickly feel the flip side of that coin. Stocks go up, and they can just as easily come right back down.
Variability around disk I/O seems to be the one that hits applications the hardest, especially the database tier of many web applications. If your application requires extremely high database transaction throughput, you would do well to consider physical servers and a real RAID array to host your database server. Read more about IOPs
Everybody has heard the saying, don’t hand someone a loaded gun. In the case of Amazon servers, you really do load your applications onto fickle and neurotic servers.
Imagine you open a car rental business. You could have two brand new fully reliable cars to rent out to customers. Your customers would be very happy, but you’d have a very small business. Alternatively you could have twenty used Pintos. You’d have some breaking down a lot, but as long as you keep ten of them rented at a time, your business is booming.
In the Amazon world you have all the tools to keep your Ford Pintos running, but it’s important to think long and hard about reliability, redundancy, and automation. Read more about Failures, Lessons & the Chaos Monkey
Managed hosting providers vary drastically in terms of the support you can expect. Companies like Rackspace, Servint or Datapipe have Support built into their DNA. They’ve grown up around having a support tech that your team can reach when they’re having trouble.
Amazon takes the opposite approach. They give you all the tools to do everything yourself. But in a crunch it can be great to have that service available to help troubleshoot and diagnose a problem. Although they’re now offering support contracts, it’s not how they started out.
If you have a crack operations team at your disposal, or you hire a third party provider like Heavyweight Internet Group Amazon Web Services gives you the flexibility and power to build phenomenal and scalable architectures. But if you’re a very small team without tons of technical know-how, you may well do better with a service-oriented provider like Rackspace et al.
A few more considerations…
- Will your cloud provider go out of business?
- Could a Subpoena against your provider draw you into the net?
- Since you don’t know where your sensitive data is, should you consider encryption?
- Should I keep additional backups outside of the cloud?
- Should I use multiple cloud providers?
- Should I be concerned about the lack of perimeter security?