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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

AWS never fit into my definition of a "cloud" solution. It's a VPS with a rich API and a lot of addons (load balancer, EBS, S3...).

From what I'm reading, Beanstalk changes this and clearly puts AWS in the category they've long claimed to be in. Not that their service wasn't great/unique before. This just puts them that much further ahead.

It's along the lines of what Heroku does with their routing mesh layer (as far as I understand it).

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Can we please all agree to disagree that there is no formal definition for cloud? I tripped across an article the other day where they were suggesting that these "PaaS" offering's weren't considered a "Cloud" by purists, and only "IaaS" (Infrastructure) - servers, cpus, network, storage - should be considered such. I was one of the original employees at Loudcloud - we certainly considered "Databases", "Applications Servers" to be cloud services.

Cloud = "That service/infrastructure/platform that you need that will be hosted by someone else in their data center"

If we wanted to be precise, we could refer to it as "Storage Clouds", "App Server Clouds", "Database Clouds", etc...

Amazon's execution with EC2 over the past few years has been excellent. If Amazon makes a Rails version of Beanstalk, Heroku should be worried as Beanstalk could take some market share from Heroku.

Heroku will probably still have the advantage of being git-based. I doubt Amazon will support git with beanstalk.

Now, Amazon may start siphoning off python users that switched to rails just to use Heroku.

According to press release

“We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.” John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amaz...

I was curious why Amazon let Heroku be acquired by Salesforce late last year. Now I know it's because they were already working on Beanstalk.

What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?

automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud.

a lot of "cloud" services these days are nearly identical to VPS services of yore, with the added new ability to create/destroy VPS nodes whenever you want. very few of the big "cloud" providers actually handle auto scaling (as it's difficult in a world where all apps are not made the same).

upvoted, but since I'm the OP, just wanted to say that yes, this is what I meant.

automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud.

You can do this with EC2. You can set up monitors based on CPU usage over a time period and it'll start new nodes if required.

S3 is 'autoscaling' for serving files. Just upload your files and pay for what you use.

but storage cannot be scaled like this, you have to design your own mechanic to handle it.

Not necessarily. If you have a popular website you can put all your images and big content on S3 and just include the URLs in your HTML. It'll magically automatically scale then.

you'll still have to build your application in such a way that supports these new nodes, though. Sessions, load balancing etc.

a "true" cloud would just handle all that stuff transparently.

Is there a "cloud" environment in which designing your application like this isn't necessary?

Google AppEngine

With GAE you have to write your application from the ground up to use Google's APIs and the design they force upon you. I'm not sure it's a fair comparison; in either situation you have to be cognizant of the environment your application will be running in if you want to take advantage of the environment.

"a "true" cloud would just handle all that stuff transparently."

Be wary of leaky abstractions.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

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