We’re all being seduced by the cloud. Amazon’s AWS has become so popular and so, seemingly, inexpensive, that people are looking at it to run a website, instead of traditional hosting. Understanding the cloud actually was the first post on this site, and while two years ago I struggled to comprehend it, today I find myself at a loss many times when asked ‘Do I need the Cloud?’
I don’t need the cloud for webhosting, and you probably don’t either.
Yes, I have a semi-cloudlike host on LiquidWeb right now, for seven of the ten domains I manage (the other three are all on their own hosts, one of which being my me Elf Dreams, where I talk about DreamHost stuff). I don’t plan on moving the other seven simply because it’s a massive effort. It’s easier to move yourself across country than it would be to move all my sites, re-build the server as I need it, get the code for the new OS (CentOS vs whatever I move to). Heck, I’m dreading upgrading to CentOS6 because of how annoying that is.
The point is that I do know and understand what the cloud is and does. It’s very cool, if you’re big enough to need it. Most indie sites are not.
How the cloud works, in general, is based on the shared resources principal. Everyone shares all the resources in the cloud at all times. If you think back to shared hosting, everyone shares all the resources on that server. The difference between the cloud and the shared is that the cloud has infinite expandability (kind of, but you get the idea), where as a shared host is limited to what it is physically. But when we were back on shared hosting, we used to have a problem with bad neighbors. You know, the other guy on your server who got tweeted by Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton, and suddenly all the sites on your server went down like a bad quiche.
That can happen on the cloud too.
It’s not exactly the same, but when you’re on a cloud, you’re on a server with a lot of virtual machines (VM). A VM is a “completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system” which is a confusing concept. The reason they’re good is that a VM isolates your hardware in a funky way, making reboots faster, while letting your VM instances share a bunch of hardware and become faster. The flip side to this is that you’re still on a real server. Instead of everyone sharing the same CPU/RAM, you get partitions so I can only use X amount and you can only use Y, and thus we don’t kill each other, until we start slaughtering input/output.
Disk I/O (input/output) can be best explained if you’re an older computer user. Remember when we used to play “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” and we’d press a button to ‘travel’ and that old floppy drive would grind like a cheap espresso brewer? That’s I/O. The disk is being read and the data is being input from the disk and output to your Apple IIe. The basic concept of this still exists, and it makes sense when you remember we have to read the data off somewhere. So if you happen to be on a box that is getting a lot of traffic, and using a lot of disk I/O, then you’re going to be slow.
There are ways to mitigate this, of course, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t always know that you need to, or how you should. And even if you do know, it’s not always very easy to do it, so the little guy, who doesn’t have the resources to do it themselves, or the money to hire someone, are left hoping that they’re okay, and often end up paying more than they need to.
And this is why you and I don’t need the cloud yet. The cloud is something I might need, but for now, there are no benefits I don’t already have with a well optimized server and a well built site. If I was a bigger site, or a company, I’d be looking at it as my next upgrade, and studying my past growth. It took me almost 10 years to grow to need a VPS, and it will likely take me at least 5 more before I need to seriously consider cloud. By then, something new will be the big thing, so the best thing I can do is study nginx and keep a finger on the pulse of web technology.
Of coures, the one major advantage to the cloud, and the reason I still see it as being around for a while, is the ability to scale up and down. A webhost provider can cannily utilize that to provide scalable shared hosting, so if you have a bad neighbor, they can be scaled up with less impact to you. But so far as I know, we’re only there with VPS demi-cloud providers right now. Give it time, and the cloud as we know it today will be tomorrow’s low-end hosting.
