Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rash of “Dear John” letters companies have written to cloud providers. The most recent, entitled “Why We Moved Off the Cloud”, comes from Mixpanel Engineering just one short year after they moved wholesale from Rackspace to Amazon’s cloud. They highlight the cloud’s strengths, particularly in Amazon’s cloud, namely: low initial costs, fast deployment times, hourly billing, and cheap CPU performance. These strengths are significant… but they don’t tell the whole story.
Mixpanel writes that, ultimately, “highly variable performance” led to their decision to ditch the cloud. This is not a problem that was introduced with cloud computing, of course; any technology that shares physical resources across multiple clients runs the risk of those clients affecting each other’s performance. There are applications for which that’s just fine, where the risk of seeing slower web response times is mitigated by the fact that the site might only see a few hundred visitors a day. But clearly, the risk was not acceptable for Mixpanel, and they moved (back) to a dedicated hosting environment.
Unfortunately, Mixpanel didn’t ask us before they gave up on the cloud and moved back to dedicated hosting. (I kid, of course; Mixpanel doesn’t even know us!) If they had asked, I would have told them about what might be the perfect solution for their particular case: private clouds. Combining the strengths of cloud computing and dedicated hosting, a private cloud would have allowed them to deploy quickly, scale up or down easily (within the constraints of their dedicated physical hardware), and manage virtualized environments seamlessly. It also would have given them the assurance of using dedicated hardware, where they would not have had to worry about their neighbor creating an I/O or network storm and making their application 6x slower, as they experienced on Amazon.
The landscape makes it easy to conclude that there are only two options: dedicated hosting or cloud computing. The major cloud players have especially tried to fuel this false dichotomy, setting up the new, glamorous cloud computing against the old, dusty dedicated hosting. The question of where one should host and using which technologies is best answered by the adage we repeat on a regular basis: “Use the correct tool for the job.” Which is why Agathon Group specializes in helping organizations find the best tool for their job, be it shared cloud, private cloud, or old-school dedicated hosting. Contact us to start that discussion today!
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"All in all, we couldn't be happier with the final result. Not only is Agathon Group full of talented professionals, but they really understand what RelyLocal is trying to do and have become more of a long-term partner than just another vendor." ~ Steve Ramsey, RelyLocal
Read more about the challenges/rewards of this project, and of course, visit RelyLocal!
]]>ChurchJuice, a site to help "energize" church communications, is a production of Re:Frame Media. Although Paul was the vision behind the designs, this site was truly a team effort, with strategy provided by 5Q Communications and site programming by Re:Frame's own Marc Miller.
Well done, everyone!
Agathon Group CTO Peter Green recently participated in a series of video interviews by CA Technologies with leading cloud hosting providers, talking about getting started in the cloud, and the need for IT departments to be part of the solution rather than the problem. Watch the short interview for more...
We’re excited to hear what many of the leaders in UX design like Dan Cederholm, Aaron Walter, Jeff Veen and many others will have to share.
We’re also looking forward to connecting with those who are attending. If you are at the conference, connect with us on Twitter and let us know! We’ll grab a bite to eat and share ideas!
See you in San Diego!
]]>We need someone who is:
Several of our largest clients in the coming year are Christian non-profits. If this is a concern, then perhaps this isn’t the right position for you at this time.
Agathon Group is a virtual company with staff distributed across five states and six timezones. We need someone we can trust to be highly motivated to produce good work even when we can’t look over your shoulder. You also need to be very good at what you do, because our clients trust us to deliver higher quality work than they can get anywhere else.
In return, we offer great team chemistry, interesting projects/challenges, competitive pay and a decent benefits package.
Please email hr@agathongroup.com to get the ball rolling.
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In case you can’t see the image, the problem I ran into was this: “Amazon is currently out of capacity.”
The fact is that any shared system is going to eventually run out of capacity. An elastic rubber band, no matter how big and stretchy, will eventually snap. There are ways to help mitigate that, but at the end of the day, that is a known design decision that allows Amazon EC2 to work a ridiculously high percentage of the time.
A different philosophy is that of our Private Clouds. When you have a Private Cloud, you know precisely where your threshold is for resources; as long as you do not consume all of your resources, you can know—not with a “high percentage”, but with a 100% assurance—that you are not going to run out. And while Amazon’s “out of capacity” error cleared up when I clicked to restart my instances, there’s no guarantee it would recover immediately. Imagine your web site running out of capacity in the middle of the day… but not because of anything you did!
The fact is that it can happen not just to Amazon, but on any shared system—even our own shared hosting or Cloud Application environments! The one way you can be assured to always have a guaranteed amount of always-available resources is by having those resources be private. And one of the only ways you can have the assurance of private resources with the flexibility and power of the cloud is with an Agathon Group Private Cloud.
]]>These are 100% telecommuting positions, but do require that candidates be eligible for employment in the United States.
We need developers who are:
Several of our largest clients in the coming year are Christian non-profits. If this is a concern, then perhaps this isn’t the right position for you at this time.
Agathon Group is a virtual company with staff distributed across five states and six timezones. We need someone we can trust to be highly motivated to produce good work even when we can’t look over your shoulder. You also need to be very good at what you do, because our clients trust us to deliver higher quality work than they can get anywhere else.
In return, we offer great team chemistry, interesting projects/challenges, competitive pay and a decent benefits package.
Please email hr@agathongroup.com to get the ball rolling.
]]>First is the problem of latency in storage. Consider this quote from a 2-year-old CNET article:
We tend to run applications close to the data they operate on for a reason. That’s because application performance is often largely a function of how quickly it can read and write the data that it’s working on. And data stored on a local hard disk can almost always be accessed faster than that same data sitting at the other end of a network pipe hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
— http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10024650-61.html
In essence, one obstacle to cloud computing and its adoption by your organization is that it sits “far away” from where your data resides. That presents a number of problems:
In addition, the implication in the referenced article is that the cloud is fine for storing transient data or simple files like images or web pages, but that mission-critical data is better left to “traditional” storage methods (e.g., an in-house SAN, which provide more feature-rich and performance-driven storage). These are all valid concerns… which we address by simply providing better cloud services.
We solve the problem of latency between your storage and your cloud by providing a cloud that can operate as an enterprise-class storage system. By building your cloud to order, we can specify the industry’s fastest drives, or largest drives, or even solid-state storage: whatever your application needs. Suddenly, we can make a compelling case to move your most disk-intensive needs to your cloud, rather than leaving it on an offsite traditional storage array, effectively negating the distance (and associated concerns) between your critical files and your website.
Perhaps you already have a SAN where everything is stored and you’re happy with that. If that’s the case, we can still bring the power of the cloud to your organization. Through our colocation services, we can often colocate your equipment right alongside your cloud in one of our data centers. Or we can send one of our clouds to your in-house data center. Either way, you can use your existing infrastructure with a private cloud to get the best of both worlds.
The other big problem with latency in the cloud is in the virtualization layer. Here’s a quote from an article in last December’s Scientific Computing:
Unfortunately, cloud computing depends heavily on the Internet communications infrastructure or the network within a virtualized datacenter to link all the computational nodes (along with the user) to the cloud. While the investment in the communications infrastructure for the Internet is clearly substantial, it also was designed as a latency-tolerant network. Similarly, the network investment in a virtualized datacenter may not be designed to meet the needs of scientific and HPC computing.
— http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles-HPC-Cloud-Computing-Pie-in-the-sky-120109.aspx
This article specifically addresses the adoption of cloud computing in high-performance computing in various scientific communities, but the challenge is a valid one for everyday cloud computing as well. The concern is that the infrastructure that makes up the physical layer of a cloud might not be optimized for speed, and may suffer at the virtualization layer as a result.
The good news is that our cloud software was designed specifically to address this concern. As a result, our clouds run at or near “wire speed” on private gigabit networks and virtually eliminate any potential for delays on the virtualization/networking layer. If gigabit ethernet isn’t fast enough, our clouds have been certified on 10-gigabit networks as well, and will support faster standards as they come out. And with our ability to build your private network to your personal specifications, we can support virtually any configuration, putting any claims of “latency in virtualization” firmly in your rear view mirror.
Despite all of this, reports continue to be released that show a relatively high reluctance to adopt cloud computing. To this, I say: drop me a line. Tell me what you need, tell me what your cloud concerns might be, and let me tell you how we can bring it all together for your organization.
]]>AppLogic, the industry’s only cloud computing platform, enables infrastructure solutions that adapt to changing needs at the speed of business. Now using AppLogic, IT professionals can: deploy online applications in minutes instead of weeks, scale on demand and deliver security and business continuity for all applications, be in full control of their cloud environment.
You can read the full award announcement or see all of the awards over at HostReview.com. We’re very proud to be associated with this great company and users of a very mature and appreciated cloud computing platform like AppLogic!
Congratulations, 3tera!
]]>The gist of it is that this newer version of the operating system offers levels of self-healing, diagnostics, and failover capabilities found in no other private Cloud software. Feel free to contact us if you want to find out more!
]]>It’s no stretch to extend this specifically to cloud computing and the green benefits pile up even higher. In addition to the points that Chris highlights, cloud computing has been shown to more effectively utilize server resources, versus traditional hosting. And a more efficient use of server resources leads to lower overall power consumption.
To illustrate this, you might need four physical servers to run your web site: one load balancer, two web servers, and a database server. The power supplies in those four servers might be rated at a total of 2000W. In comparison, running your web application on one of our private clouds could get you the same computing power, only with two servers rated at a total of 1200W. That’s a power savings of 40%… and running your web application on our shared cloud (which is an example of what Chris calls a “multi-tenant architecture”) could help you reduce your carbon footprint even more. Even if the “green” benefits of saving power don’t excite you, saving some “green” on power (the price of which is only ever increasing) ought to at least get you interested!
Saving money and being good stewards of the environment, all while maintaining (if not surpassing) performance and flexibility… it’s clear that cloud computing (and SaaS in general) is a major “green” win.
]]>Read the entire press release, or read more about IPv6 as well as why it’s so important. Then contact us for more information on how you can make IPv6 and cloud computing work for you today!
]]>It’s in the spirit of helping this conversation along that Agathon Group is sponsoring the Pau Hana Party for Aloha on Rails. The party starts right after the last conference session on Monday, October 5th at Tiki’s Bar and Grill, just a five minute walk toward Diamondhead. Bring your conference badge to get in, and join us for live music, free drinks, pupus and prize drawings.
Be sure to find us and join the conversation — who knows, maybe we’ll all come up with the Next Big Thing. Either way, there are certainly worse places to hang than at Tiki’s watching the sunset over Waikiki Beach! Aloha!
