-----Original Message----- From: Brandon Kim Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 7:58 AM
Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch
Has our industry ever really fundamentally defined what is "cloud computing"?????
Even though "MPLS" is sort of a buzzword too, we can define it, how it works, it's protocol and such...
But cloud computing?
My take on "cloud computing" is simply the provisioning servers or virtual servers (say, VMWare or KVM) on the fly as needed. So you would have a "pool" of servers. When load for one application rises, more servers for that application are taken from the pool and added to the mix as needed. When load drops, that instances are removed from the rotation handling that application and returned to the pool of free (virtual) servers. Providers of network gear have been working on applications that monitor the gear in the application delivery path (e.g. metrics on load balancers) and automatically deploy instances as needed to handle that application. This would be more of interest to providers of "bursty" applications where they might have high load sometimes but a relatively low "base" load. It could also be of interest to people who serve customers in different time zones, such as the US and Europe where the US application can be turned down at night and an application serving Europe loaded up during their business day. It could also be of interest for someone who is expecting a temporary "surge" of activity. It leads, though, to a completely different kind of attack called the "denial of sustainability" attack where a cloud-based provider is hit with a flood of "legitimate" transactions causing the "cloud" management to kick in more servers to handle the additional load. If that cloud is rented, a content provider could be hit with a huge bill.