From the study (
PDF,40p)
" ... we realized that
because there is less control over the environment we cannot assume that every instance tested is identical at start up, over time and per location. This causes great uncertainty about the capability to process workloads consistently."
Great post
Keep it coming.
Reading the edumacted paper rambling.
I stand by this all being commodity, despite the academic knitpicks. Remember it's such mentalities that mutates virtualized VPS into cloud and dances around the liberal definitions, in effect considering a Raspberry Pi potentially a cloud hosting thing, or any iOT device a cloud hosting thing. It is boundless insanity.
Me, I remain a limited buying it audience for cloud and expect the fixings and a good dog show to buy it or belief that such is actually cloud. Includes mature API, mature documentation with working code samples, actual community, ideally customer support that is more useful than most people are accustom to.
If a cloud company meets my standards they would also break out of being commodity in some additional manners. Doesn't mean they are entirely non-commodity even then, just means on the spine of the matter dancing about. But in clarity, in fairness, if someone has a redundant HA installation with NAS/SAN as the base of their buildout it's today a tier above most of the market and the commodity Xeon white box + CentOS + Solus = done. However, what isn't commodity approach today, very well may be down the short and local road. Tomorrow buildouts are almost out of necessity going to have to mature and change to compete in the market. Being average, going along with the stream to get along, that's very commodity-like behavior.
Reading the first 11 pages of the PDF above, it's typical harping on performance of CPU bound tasks. Commodity, the scripts all run on these, a box of equals, but some are less equal. While AWS might be bottom of the pack, their tools and addon features might make it a far more superior eco system. Inverse relationship there on raw computing is performance units per dollar, which starts to go the way of lowend* with this performs so much better for so much less (while totalling missing the features, elasticity (if it exists), etc.)... I can see baremetal-like simple boxes with direct storage (i.e. traditional VPS) being faster and also having less container shaping (lack of knowledge usually). Of course they are faster, direct drive channel = fast, wide open cores = faster... No IO wait to SAN, cheap to deploy... Just wait until one has to scale now, replicate now, do real near time or live-like time stuff --- it won't and cannot unless you pre-build all that yourself and create the scripts and logic to plumb it all together.
I think battles like this are comparing commodities again, just different commodities.
One is like corn (VPS)
Other is like flour (AWS, Google, more real cloud computing)
Both are related, both are product base same, will accomplish the same thing, one type is just more refined. Refined is fine, if you need it. A Mercedes is a lovely vehicle, but a GM will do at much lower cost.
Oddly in this market, we have arguably a larger chunk of the market buy the Mercedes-like brands, at greater cost, with less performance raw computing wise and probably typically without actually utilizing the actual benefits / differentiators of those products. Speaks to the buying habits of trained population. Speaks to the power of branding and proper marketing (although I remain completely disgusted by Amazon and find their approach like most of these big competitors to be insanely dry, traditionally broken, unfriendly to n00bs, and artificially barrier reefed).
