FreeBSD on Rackspace Could

[Tom Worster]

On 11/13/10 6:32 PM, "dalescott at shaw.ca" <dalescott at shaw.ca> wrote:

>> but dedicated/vps does not offer what cloud computing does.
>
>What do feel are the advantages of the cloud?

i haven't used one yet but, as far as i can tell, the interesting
differences derive from how the could platform implements network, storage
and compute elements in a distributed hardware system meshed up with a
mesh interconnect (presumably of the high-performance computing type).

the resulting advantages for me: the storage arrays are raid 10 and all
their responsibility not mine; shared file systems are part of the
platform so i don't need to mess around with nfs; load balancing (which i
currently can't afford) is part of the network platform; so is the address
juggling needed for high availability (failover and restoration); and the
price for each vm seems to allow me maybe 2 or 3x as many hosts as i get
with dedicated servers so i can separate the db servers from the rest of
the app and assign no more memory than i need to each vm.

in summary, it seems i can get the high-availability, load-sharing
architecture i want at a price that's beyond my budget with dedicated
hosts.

and it looks like there's a bunch of other nice aspects that aren't
radical but will be time savers: backups, standby images, simpler sysadmin
(there's a lot less to a cloud server "slice" than a whole computer),
monitoring, persistence.

does this begin to answer your question?


this weekend i tried out gentoo on a wee celeron box i have. (someone here
said gentoo was the linux most like freebsd and rackspace cloud offers
it). it's the first linux experience i've had in which i didn't feel like
a clumsy incompetent. the similarities and differences relative to freebsd
are interesting. maybe i'll write up my initial impressions.