I fired up my first instance of a Xen-based virtual Linux box on Amazon's just-announced grid, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Then I logged in as root and copied over a little Python-based search service that I run on my own server at home, along with the several XML data files that it searches. I fired up Python, pointed a browser at the domain name that EC2 had assigned to my virtual server, and...it just worked.
...
As the service's name suggests, though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2's the only game in town.
But not for long. Earlier this week, I met with the folks at 3Tera to discuss their AppLogic grid system. It's a kissing cousin to EC2, but with a more sophisticated approach to configuring and managing bundles of Linux applications along with other so-called virtual appliances that encapsulate firewalls and load balancers. The AppLogic management console is a slick AJAX application that you use to wire up collections of these virtual appliances and clone them for reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
As Andrew Binstock pointed out in an email to me this morning:
3Tera sells infrastructure to hosting providers like Amazon. They do not do hosting at all, nor have any plans to.That's correct. I did not mean to suggest a similarity between 3Tera's business model for AppLogic and Amazon's for EC2, only a similarity in their use of virtualized Linux. But I can see that the column as written may imply the former, in which case: oops.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/08/31.html#a1516