Spotlight on Next Big Thing: Cloud Computing

I have been following cloud computing for quite some time. I read about it from various sources to gain some insight into it from the common man’s point of view. Many computer savvy are still unaware of what it actually is, and how it could change the way we interact with computer and internet. Finally Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. The network of servers and connections is collectively known as “the cloud”. Or we can say cloud computer is internet-based computing device.

Many computer pundits predict that it will be the next big thing in the digital revaluation.

Applications in the cloud: this is what almost everyone has already used in the form of gmail, yahoo mail, the rest of google apps, the various search engines, wikipedia, etc

Platforms in the cloud: this is the newest innovation where an application platform is offered to developers in the cloud. Developers write their application and then upload their code into the cloud where the app is run magically somewhere, typically being able to scale up automagically as usage for the app grows. Example: Mosso, Google App Engine, etc

Infrastructure in the cloud: this is the most general offering that Amazon has pioneered and where RightScale offers its management platform. Developers and system administrators obtain general compute, storage, queueing, and other resources and run their applications with the fewest limitations. This is the most powerful type of cloud in that virtually any application and any configuration that is fit for the internet can be mapped to this type of service.

Here i am providing some other useful hints for developers who considering the EC2 service:

1. “Before spending too much time configuring and customizing an AMI, find one that suits your needs from the start so you won’t have to redo any work later on down the road. Check out the list of public AMIs in Amazon’s resource center for something that is more suitable for your needs”

2. “When packaging up your own image using the ‘ec2-bundle-vol’ command, make sure you specify a clean folder using the ‘–d’ flag otherwise bundling the same image twice will result in an error due to the conflicting sets of temporary files.”

3. “When working with your image, note that the main drive/partition (where the system files are) has a very limited capacity (10 GB in our case). So when dealing with large files/directories use ‘/mnt’ as it has over 100 GB.

4. “If a machine is terminated, all your data will be lost except for what was backed up from the last time you ran an ‘ec2-bundle-vol’”

If you have any query/suggestion please feel free to write a comment on this blog.

Thanks,
~Kumar