thanks for the great post – it is a good overview of where we as an industry are and how we got there. And more importantly, what can you do today if you need to get a service up. Some problems are solved, others are in the works (and maybe some are still overlooked).

BTW, also thanks for all your input on AppLogic (you’re in the top 5 posters). Just a few notes: we’re working on a global application control panel (allowing you to have a common view between all your apps, no matter where they are, and move them around as you please); we have, in fact, added auto-mounting of new volumes (straight per your request). We still leave little disk space and, by default, have no swap (except in the VPS templates) — but have added a simple and safe way to resize volumes.

While we are away from BigTable-like scalability for relational databases, clustered MySQL, with a little bit of help and some understanding, should be able to take people from start to at least some level of scaling. (We’ll be looking to see at what the PhDs will turn out — or the open source community on more scalable databases — it is the 21st century, after all!)

Scott, how is AppEngine competitive to EC2? They appear to provide completely different levels of abstraction… this is a bit like saying that PDAs compete with desktops (i.e., while to a degree you can do some things equally well on both, they are still apples and oranges). AppEngine provides an application stack (and in the future, more than one); EC2 provides VMs on demand… Now, if you are saying that AppEngine is more attractive to developers than EC2 because they don’t have to deal with infrastructure, images, /etc/fstabs, etc., I would agree. However, sysadmins are unlikely to get on the AppEngine bandwagon — or at least I haven’t seen anything that will make them do that.

Regards,
– Peter

I see that you mention GoGrid along side EC2, Media Temple, AppLogic and the likes. First off, I’m the guy tasked with evangelizing the GoGrid technology so I’m pleased that you and others have realized what a powerful offering GoGrid brings to startups.

To dive into the tech a bit, it is rather fascinating to read how people view these offerings as purely for sys-admins or developers and that they might be conceived as being mutually exclusive. In my mind, whichever technology solution you decide on should be one that completes the 80/20 rule, but for all parties involved, with 80 meeting the needs and 20 they could care less about. GoGrid tries to fill holes that other providers may have (e.g., root/admin access, full Win/Linux images, persistence, free load balancing). Obviously, there may be deficiencies with any offering but all the different providers are working for fill those holes.

I’m curious about the “gotchas” that you talk about. Any product has gotchas, thus the idea about 80/20…hopefully 80 percent of your needs will be met.

I encourage anyone who is interested in looking at GoGrid as a fundamental offering for startups to contact me (through the GoGrid blog) as I can help evaluate needs and clarify options. What might be good for one, won’t be good for another.

Again, thanks for the comprehensive read!

-Michael

FIrst, regarding DNS, the problem isn’t so much getting distributed, redundant dns, it’s getting it in the numbers you need it. I think the providers have their services set up wrong, but that’s a problem I don’t have the entrepreneurial spirit to solve at the moment

Anyway, you can get something like 100,000 requests for $100 per month from ultradns. You can get it from securityspace.com for less, and there’s nothing on their site about number of requests that I’ve found, but it can be had. Some dedicated hosting providers also let you use their dns, but I’ve never ventured down that path, because I haven’t found one that gives you the control I’d like to have (some require a support ticket to add/change a DNS record – blech).

As for 301′s, it was kind of an example, and a bad one, as you point out. Maybe everything that any Apache module can do can be emulated in app code.

I don’t doubt that AppEngine changes the game, and to that extent, it can be a competitor by creating a new playing field, which is The Google Way. But I think they target two very different types of development teams and systems groups. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out. I think system administration will be forever changed as a result of these disruptive paradigms, and I think it’s long overdue, to be honest.

Also, you mentioned that in 2008 you can get redundant, globally-distributed DNS for “relatively little money”. Care to share where one can get this?

I’ll agree that EC2 is more admin-friendly than AppEngine, I don’t think EC2 really makes it a ‘no-brainer’ for a sysadmin either. Rollout is only a tiny fraction of what a sysadmin does, of course, and you don’t address how EC2 has made is really easy to perform ongoing management, maintenance, disaster recovery, backup, etc. I would guess that the reason for this is because… well… the model for doing these things isn’t exactly “same old same old”.

I’m really excited about working within a computing paradigm that has yet to clearly define itself and is therefore subject to constant, drastic change. I’m also hoping that persistent storage for EC2 makes its way to the rest of the user community sooner than later, because I think that solves *one* of the problems with managing EC2, and can make probably *all* of the rest of the issues a little bit easier to deal with. Static IPs were also nice, but still left a couple of issues unsolved. From what I’ve seen, EC2 seems to me to be the frontrunner out of all of these solutions if you’re coming from a sysadmin background, and it’s progressing rapidly toward being a no-brainer, but it’s not soup yet, and the issues like global distribution and tighter integration amongst the various services one might use are still up in the air.

I hate to sound like I’m complaining, because I’m really more interested in talking about how these solutions might look or where they might come from. I’m just trying to start a dialog here that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere.

Thanks for posting!!