Meta-point: I'm surprised at how accurate this article was in terms of the way it explained the concepts and the jargon. It seems to be rare in non-tech publications.
I've always been very impressed by how accurate the Economist's tech articles are. It gives me more confidence in their articles on topics I don't know enough about to catch errors in.
I wasn't familiar with the "follow the moon" approach of having tasks move around the planet to be in places where demand is low, cooling cheap, and electricity cheap (if they use time-of-use rates).
It makes perfect sense now that I think of it..
Anybody knows of companies/organisations that do that? What kind of tasks is this useful for?
I think the biggest problem right now is the lack of standardization of formats. I know that when I was writing sections in our VMM we didn't really think about VM formats. The thing is that your data representation tends to be heavily influenced by the VMM design and therefore VMMs with different designs tend to have different data formats. Hypothetically it's possible to develop a standardized format, but we'll see how far that goes practically.
Not really. The fact that they have a standard that only they use doesn't mean all that much. When Xen or KVM adopt it then I may call that progress.
XenServer (the version from Citrix/XenSource) has the ability to convert OVF; natively, they use the Microsoft-derived VHD format.
That's true -- I forgot about that. The one caveat to that is that it is primarily targeted by the XenServer product: Xen, KVM, and QEMU tend to use the qcow or raw formats. I'm also worried about new features coming out from one or the other VMMs that aren't supported by the current format. Without an established way for anyone to adapt the format, I'm not sure it will provide a long term solution. I do have a specific feature in mind, but unfortunately you will have to wait for the colleague's PhD thesis to find out about it ;)
The spot prices for the large EC2 instance seem really close to the price of on-demand instances: $0.34 from the N. Virginia data center. I guess Amazon will not be reducing their prices anytime soon.
Most relevant line from the article: "Unfortunately, the coining of new jargon is likely to proceed even faster than the evolution of computing markets."
Would you rather we called it mainframe computing or the internet? Wouldn't that be the wrong "jargon" to apply to amazon web services and their ilk.
Mass power outages can be huge disasters. Will the future bring with it 'mass computing outages'? How will we handle that?
outsourcing all your stuff to the same company/location is a huge mistake. For 'the cloud' to become a viable alternative to in-house servers, we will need more than one compatible provider.