Thorsten von Eicken

Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just because the cloud is "in." Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term "cloud computing" means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the Internet, etc. What is still confusing to many is how the different offerings compare from Amazon Web Services to Google App Engine and Force.com. I recently heard a characterization of three different levels of clouds which really helps put the various offerings into perspective. Here’s my rephrasing: Applications in the cloud: this is what almost everyone has already used in the form of gmail, yahoo mail, wordpress.com (hosting this blog), the rest of google apps, ... (more)

Cloud Computing vs. Grid Computing - What's the Difference?

Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog Recently Rich Wolski (UCSB Eucalyptus project) and I were discussing grid computing vs. cloud computing. An observation he made makes a lot of sense to me. Since he doesn’t blog [...], let me repeat here what he said. Grid computing has been used in environments where users make few but large allocation requests. For example, a lab may have a 1000 nod... (more)

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store Opens Up S3 and The Cloud

Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon are putting out the technology that the enterprise and SaaS providers need to move beyond testing the waters and take advantage of the Cloud today. The latest, and most important from the data storage perspective, is Amazon’s Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Over the years we’ve witnessed a shift to hosted IT infrastructure where all the issues surrou... (more)

The Cloud is Coming of Age

Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog The cloud is coming of age. Amazon took another huge leap forward when it announced that EC2 is now out of beta, together with an SLA that is evidence of Amazon’s commitment to provide top-notch service. Their uptime has been stellar, and they are now standing behind their offering contractually in a much stronger way, and signaling how customers can s... (more)