Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

[Tom <bifrost () minions com>]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, William Herrin wrote:
> Why would you imagine that a $30/month virtual private server is built
> on an enterprise-grade virtualization cluster?

A lot of the time "the cloud" is billed as just that.

The reality is that its more often a federated cluster of machines with 
some duct tape and glue. Sometimes that duct tape is name brand, sometimes 
its not.

There are currently no viable OSS solutions that actually do HA in terms 
of storage nor VMs. Its all basically storage+machine provisioning, no 
healthchecking and no real auto-recovery. I've spent a fair amount of time 
digging into this for my business, and thats my state of the world.

That said, if you want HA or even "failover" with any provider, you 
basically need to look at an expensive VMWare based solution.

There are projects out there to build truly HA OSS "clouds" but they're 
not ready yet, and they're not terribly cheap either.

-Tom