Category → cloud apps
Cloudapps
When the cloud buzzword hit the intrawebs, one issue I kept thinking about turned out to be more interesting than I thought. Different type of applications have varying requirements when it comes to running inside a cloud. A virtualized environment to be more precise. A virtualized environment means it’s just another computer right? So, it’s just a VPS somewhere isn’t it? Yes but there’s more to the story.
“Cloud requirements” differ from person to person and for what they’ll be using the technology. And of course, methods for reaching to the clouds are as diverse as the requirements (ahem).
- For a hosting company adopting cloud technologies means having an infrastructure that enable them to create virtual machines from a cluster of servers upon customer requests. Using Xen/KVM/OpenNebula etc… they can easily do this. Additionally what they need is a nice web based interface that they can integrate into their existing customer portals.
- A web based application vendor, changes they need to make their applications to run in the cloud is minimal. Here, a differentiation should be made for single-tenanted vs. multi-tenanted applications. Popular multi-tenanted web applications include Google Apps and Salesforce.com. SQL Azure, the popular database as a service platform runs on a multi-tenanted version of SQL Server.
- When it’s not a web based application things start to get interesting. Paul has written a wonderful post explaining the requirements that need to fulfill in order to be called a “cloud native” application.
As Paul mentions, being “on the cloud”, applications need to have features like autoscaling. Pay for what you use has a huge advantage of paying for resources depending on your daily resource needs. Several more aspects are listed on his post.