The term “cloud” has become highly present in the IT industry during recent times. Making something available or putting something “in the cloud” is a major trend. So what is the fuzz all about?
What are those clouds actually doing?
Cloud computing is defined as scalable resources made available to users as a service over the Internet. Cloud services are programs running as software as a service within scalable environments. Providers of scalable/cloud resources are for example Google Appspot, Amazon Web Services and most web hosting companies, like ourselves, that offer you a set of resources within a cluster (e.g. cloud) of servers. Take your hosting account as an example: You have your files stored on a storage server, that is combined with multiple other similar machines in a big storage cloud. Your visitors access your files via web servers that are united in a clustered environment with redundancy and fallback mechanisms, making it almost impossible to experience downtime. Also, scripts and applications are accessing databases on special database servers that can be extended as the need arises. Thereby the whole concept of a web hosting package is in fact a very good incarnation of a cloud service – except those (often small) providers that offer all services from a single machine. Obviously, there is no redundancy or fallback available there.
Okay, but what’s the advantage of cloud computing?
The advantages are pretty straight forward. You (your application or website) is hosted on a big server farm, where each server is performing a special task and being a backup or fallback for other machines in the farm. Your web application can use resources across the various machines, hence making it extremely simple to host many services on one big server farm (cloud). The biggest advantage for you as a user is the (almost) unlimited scalability your application can achieve within the cloud. By adding further resources to the cloud, the provider can deal with an increase in resource usage by the users, thus giving the users the ability to grow their projects within the same environment, without having to switch product or provider every time they reach a certain size, disc space or bandwidth.
20 comments (leave a comment)
This Looks Interesting.
Any more info on this? like how it works.
Maybe an image would be useful
by Jesse Manalansan on June 22, 2009 at 11:38
An image from the servage.net homepage http://www.servage.net/img/newWebsite/modern/pageContent/screenshots/availability_systemoverview.jpg
by WaaaghNL on June 22, 2009 at 17:13
I do not get it :(
by Mehdi on June 22, 2009 at 19:35
Servage has been offering clustered (cloud) hosting from the beginning and thats why I like them the most.
The reason why this tecnology hasn’t yet expanded to the hosting industry it’s mainly because it lacks the necesary standars to implement it, so each of the companys who have tried to implement this tecnology the past few years pretty much have been forced to redesign Webhosting technology from a scratch.
From those companys Servege is one of the few than have done it successfully and I think that’s pretty amazing.
But now “Cloud Hosting” has become very popular and a couple of realy big companys are near to present their “Cloud” services for production.
Now it’s the time for Servage to keep up and rise with new features diverse services.
keep the good work guys, it’s realy apreciated.
by Roger on June 23, 2009 at 05:23
..but, not to sound unpolite: If you were running your setup like a “real” cloud environment, there wouldn’t be a need from time to time to move our storage space around between fileservers and change directory-paths for the customers…
That said, I agree with you that things gets very complex due to missing standards for interfaces between services!
Reply by Per Strömqvist (Servage) on June 24, 2009 at 06:57
True … since we have a generous storage policy we occasionally use up all the storage devices in our storage clusters (triggering a move). We are on the other hand running a small setup on one cluster where we are using a true *cloud* setup, where the file system is actually able to scale as we add more storage-boxes. There is many cool file systems coming, like ZFS as one. But there is no real standard for this industry, so as a hosting provider with a need for massive storage, high speed, zero-tolerance (how many of you accept downtime?) and support for all kind of applications … we have to invent ourself and work hard to be innovative.
by Thomas Braad Perret-Gentil on June 23, 2009 at 15:55
I disagree servage is not a CLOUD provider…
They are a clustered hosting provider if they were a cloud provider I would be able to purchase more hits/bandwidth/disk space.
Reply by Per Strömqvist (Servage) on June 24, 2009 at 07:01
We could sell more hits, bandwidth and storage space, but our business policy is not to do so. We focus on “One Solution” to make the product easy to compare with other hosting providers who choose to have a complex business model. The platform is however sharing many concepts with the *cloud*.
by steven on June 23, 2009 at 22:56
Thanks..
by Film izle on June 26, 2009 at 14:35
I fear Google may in the future regard this under their webmaster criteria as underhand.
by lee on June 26, 2009 at 21:21
“the cloud” isnt just clustered servers. Its more like linux fedora on raid 5, and when you add an extra disk, it rebuilds itself to include the extra disk. The way servage is set up, its “like” cloud computing, in as much as clustered servers in some areas but not all.
In a cluster for example running php, its like a multi core processor, effectively a super computer, put two servers beside each other, do the required config to make them clustered and you have a mini super computer, make them then serve an application and you have “the cloud”
So in reality you probably have quite a few mini-clouds, and infrastructure and equipment to direct everything to the right clouds.
Reply by Per Strömqvist (Servage) on June 29, 2009 at 13:46
According to Wikipedia: “A cloud is a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere”. But we have joined in and started to use this term for other things. You are right that as a shared hosting provider some things scale and some don’t. But we strongly feel that we have among the best platforms to operate shared hosting on (Servage OS was built for this purpose). We have some 1000+ servers, some are “clouded” as storage, some as front-ends, some as e-mail and some as FTP’s. The only thing that currently doesn’t scale well in a shared hosting is database. For this you all see that your DB’s are located on different host; 1036, 1046 etc. But … we have some plans for this. As soon as the cpanel upgrade is completed, we will put plans into actions.
by Damien on June 29, 2009 at 12:59
Per, could you please inform us about the plans regarding the database upgrade?
Thank you in advance!
by Constantinos Spiliakos on July 2, 2009 at 09:07
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
Reply by Jakob Jensen (Servage) on July 13, 2009 at 10:54
You are welcome ti link to our magazine or include posts via the RSS feed.
by markez linda on July 12, 2009 at 23:13
this is great i think i will host here next time
by animeku on August 10, 2009 at 15:40
Explaining things simply to customers is important and I get that and will follow suit, adding an [Abbreviations] page to my web site. Thank you for the explaination.
by Rebecca Bowen on September 3, 2009 at 05:48
Can you provide more information on this? keep up the good work
by Business Web Hosting on November 22, 2009 at 09:15
Your blog is great. I m gonna read more, thanks.
by Yaroslav4 on April 29, 2010 at 15:56
Cloud technology is really the future. I would like to hear more about it.
by dave on May 28, 2010 at 09:35